A truth about love

"Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding"

Norman Maclean, from A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

A nice surprise concerning my book Blindsided:Recognizing and Dealing with Passive-Aggressive Leadership in the Workplace

My books can be found on Goodreads, of which I became a member a few years ago. Blindsided is my only published book so far that has gotten ratings on Goodreads, and I was pleased to see that it has garnered 4 out of 5 stars (4 = I really like it, and 5 = It was amazing). It still sells, seven years after it was first published.

I have nearly finished writing a new book about modern workplaces, this time with an emphasis on what employees want. I will be publishing it very soon.

But for those of you who haven't read Blindsided, perhaps now is the time to think about doing so.

What Georges Bernanos said

Faith is not a thing which one 'loses,' we merely cease to shape our lives by it.

Hope is a risk that must be run.

It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so.

No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.

The wish to pray is a prayer in itself. God can ask no more than that of us.

Hell, madam, is to love no longer.

It is the perpetual dread of fear, the fear of fear, that shapes the face of a brave man.

Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterward.

Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air.

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.
----------------------------------------

Georges Bernanos wrote a wonderful book, Diary of a Country Priest, that I read many years ago, but stumbled upon again recently. First published in 1937, it is the story of an unassuming parish priest, who tries his best to serve his people. His trials and tribulations, his poor health and his feelings of inferiority are really what the novel is about—how he tries to be a good and humble priest, a good man and a good Catholic. Well worth reading. 

Learning by living

Eleanor Roosevelt was married to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States, and served as First Lady during his three terms--from 1933 until 1945. Her husband died in 1945. When she married him, she found herself thrust into the limelight of politics and political society, which at first made her uncomfortable, but which she learned to master with time and experience. I recently finished her amazing book You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life, first published in 1960 when she was seventy-six years old. She writes from the heart, in an candid and straightforward way, about the following: • Learning to Learn • Fear—the Great Enemy • The Uses of Time • The Difficult Art of Maturity • Readjustment is Endless • Learning to Be Useful• The Right to Be an Individual • How to Get the Best Out of People •Facing Responsibility • How Everyone Can Take Part in Politics • Learning to Be a Public Servant.

The first thing that struck me was that her wisdom and advice are every bit as good as, if not better than, most of the advice proffered by self-help books authored by psychologists or psychiatrists with years in their respective fields. Why? Because she not only talks about the fears and lack of self-confidence that she had to overcome in order to become a public person, she says flat-out that we must do that which we think we cannot do. We must face our fears if we are to grow and evolve as human beings, if we are to live an honest life. She also talks about the importance of being useful and embracing politics and public life. She stresses that we must take an interest in politics as the citizens of a democratic nation; that is our responsibility as free people. We must not stoop to cynicism and negativity when we talk about politics and politicians; they are important for the future of a free country.  She is a wonderful role model for a successful and honest life, for both women and men. Her advice is relevant for both genders. But I would absolutely encourage young women to read her book, especially in this age that defines a person’s worth mostly by whether they are good-looking or not. Eleanor Roosevelt said about herself that she knew that she was not the most attractive woman in her family already when she was a child; it never stopped her. Young women especially need to hear this, because there is too much emphasis in today’s world on having the perfect face and figure, often at the expense of cultivating one’s intelligence, wit, and talents.    

Eleanor Roosevelt was an honest, intelligent, introspective, persevering, patient and empathetic woman, who made a real success of her life in spite of the many difficulties she faced. I found her advice quite straightforward, no-nonsense, honest and helpful. She really did 'learn by living', and that is the message her book imparts. It's possible to grow and change with experience, if you tackle the challenges that life tosses you rather than evade them. She was way ahead of her time in terms of how she lived her life and how she looked at her life as a woman. I recommend this book if you want wisdom that will actually help you as you make your way in this life.

The Amazing Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the American author and poet, who was married to Charles Lindbergh, the famous American aviator. Their life together is the stuff of legend—traveling in their own small plane around the world, the kidnapping and murder of their infant son, living in Europe to escape the subsequent media circus, their celebrity status in the USA—all detailed in the individual biographies written about each of them.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh dreamed of and attained a successful literary career in the course of her long life; she lived to be 94 years old and was a poet and author of a number of books. She also learned to fly and accompanied her famous husband on many of his flights as his co-pilot. She was likely unaware of his extramarital affairs with several German women that resulted in a number of children. If she did know, she took her secret with her in death, and coped in life in the way that she knew best--she pursued her writing. This is what she wrote about writing: 

“I cannot see what I have gone through until I write it down. I am blind without a pencil……. I am convinced that you must write as if no one were ever going to see it. Write it all, as personally and specifically as you can, as deeply and honestly as you can. … In fact, I think it is the only true way to reach the universal, through the knot-hole of the personal. So do, do go ahead and write it as it boils up: the hot lava from the unconscious. Don’t stop to observe, criticize, or be ‘ironic.’ Just write it, like a letter, without rereading. Later, one can decide what to do.”

--From "Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947-1986", by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (2012, Pantheon) 

But it is her wonderful book--Gift from the Sea (published in 1955)--that captured me with its wisdom, inspiration and simplicity. I first read it when I was seventeen and it made a huge impression on me. She wrote about women’s lives and responsibilities and how they often conflicted with the desire to lead an independent life and to pursue a literary career. She wrote the following:

“To be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother-core, like spokes from the hub of a wheel. The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass: husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider's web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes. How difficult for us, then, to achieve a balance in the midst of these contradictory tensions, and yet how necessary for the proper functioning of our lives. How much we need, and how arduous of attainment is that steadiness preached in all rules for holy living. How desirable and how distant is the ideal of the contemplative, artist, or saint -- the inner inviolable core, the single eye.

With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls -- woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of Woman and Career, Woman and the Home, Woman and Independence. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.

What is the answer? There is no easy answer, no complete answer. I have only clues, shells from the sea. The bare beauty of the channeled whelk tells me that one answer, and perhaps a first step, is in simplification of life, in cutting out some of the distractions. But how? Total retirement is not possible, I cannot shed my responsibilities. I cannot permanently inhabit a desert island. I cannot be a nun in the midst of family life. I would not want to be. The solution for me, surely, is neither in total renunciation of the world, nor in total acceptance of it. I must find a balance somewhere, or an alternating rhythm between these two extremes; a swinging of the pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return. In my periods of retreat, perhaps I can learn something to carry back into my worldly life. I can at least practice for these two weeks the simplification of outward life, as a beginning”.

-- From ''Gift From the Sea''  (1955, Pantheon)

This is the kind of book promotion I like

I'm a Kindle book reader; I download a lot of e-books to my iPad from Amazon.com. Every now and then I get emails from Amazon recommending books for me to read; their recommendations run the gamut from science fiction to workplace organizational behavior. I've gotten several emails from Amazon.com lately recommending Management and Leadership books that might be of interest to me. Imagine my surprise when I saw the first book suggestion--my book! Couldn't be happier with this kind of book promotion, especially if these types of promotional emails are being sent to other customers with similar interests. Thank you Amazon!

Limiting the power of self-limiting beliefs over us

Is being happy an emotional option, something we can choose to be in our daily lives? If so, why don’t we choose to be happy more often? The answer may be a bit more surprising than you might think. How we choose to respond to a specific situation that happens to us or around us has to do with our belief system--about ourselves and the world around us. We may not even be fully aware of these beliefs (conscious of their presence) or of the impact they have on our lives. That is the premise of a short and unassuming book I read last week that led me to start thinking about the beliefs that I grew up with and that may still affect my present life and the choices I make. It is not the events of ordinary life per se that make us unhappy or that cause our unhappiness, rather it is how we choose to respond to them based on the beliefs that we have about ourselves that lead to un-happiness, as the author of Emotional Options, Mandy Evans, puts it. Un-happiness is the opposite of happiness--the state of not being happy. This definition suggests the idea of choice or the idea of a switch; that one could perhaps choose to switch on happiness and switch off un-happiness. It suggests that happiness is an option, a choice that we exercise to use or not to use. So that much of what happens in our ordinary lives—love, friendships, workplace interactions, and so forth—do not in and of themselves make us happy or unhappy. Yes, love can disappear or end; yes, friendships can disintegrate or we can be betrayed or deeply disappointed; yes, workplace interactions can be difficult or downright impossible leading us to feel like failures. The author’s point is that bad things happen to good people; you cannot escape or prevent that fact. Sickness and death happen, for example, betrayal and divorce likewise. The list goes on. How we respond to the bad things that happen to us is a choice that we make, even if we are not really aware of the fact that we are choosing. Our choices will make us happy or un-happy. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? When I first read this, I thought, I’ve heard this before in various guises. It’s not uncommon to hear from the self-help world that you can choose to be happy. But after thinking about it, I realized that it’s not very common to hear that un-happiness, or the state of being un-happy, is the result of some rather limiting beliefs we have about ourselves and the world around us. And it is those beliefs that are difficult to confront and subsequently change or root out. Some of those beliefs have seeped into our subconscious minds after years of hearing them repeated—by parents, teachers, authority figures, sometimes even partners/friends, and finally by ourselves to ourselves.

Mandy Evans points out that we all have a belief system—some of those beliefs we are aware of, others we are unaware of. Some of those beliefs are self-defeating beliefs (Mandy’s words), and take the following forms: waiting for happiness beliefs (many people experience this, I call it the IF ONLY way of living—I’ll be happy if only I become successful, rich, if I get even, get promoted, etc. Many people live for the future and if you asked them whether they are happy in the here and now, they wouldn’t know how to answer, because they are so focused on future happiness); events control your feelings beliefs; beliefs about anger; beliefs about changing circumstances; life-extinguishing beliefs; beliefs about punishment. And if a society believes in the value of punishment, we can find ourselves burdened with dealing with the following: the chiding inner monologue (you’re no good, you’re a fake, you don’t deserve success or happiness. How many of us can honestly say we don’t feel that way sometimes? Most women I know do, including myself, and believe me, it’s not easy to deliver a lecture about your work and feel that way when you step up to the podium); verbal abuse directed at someone else; physical abuse; torture and death. She defines happiness as emotional freedom. How do we get there? That’s what this book should help you with—getting there. And when you arrive there, it should be able to help you stay there, because there’s always the possibility of slipping backwards. We don’t live in a perfect world, so we will never achieve perfection of the self. But if we confront ourselves when we think in black and white rigid ways, or when we are afraid, anxious, depressed or defeatist, picking up this book, reading it through and asking ourselves the questions it poses can help. I bought a Kindle version of the book, and have already highlighted many passages. It will help me find those sections that I might want to re-read at a future point when I need a pep talk. Because I admit it, I need pep talks. My inner voices are not always kind to me. I wish I knew where they came from. I feel sure that some of them are a direct result of our upbringing in the 1970s: it was not a good thing to be proud, assertive, boastful, too smart, too good-looking, too free, too anything. Like the ‘jantelov’ in Norway (you should never think that you are ‘someone’ or that you are better than anyone else), some of the ways we woman were encouraged to behave when we were growing up were downright detrimental to our self-esteem and held many of us down, or kept us in our ‘places’. But isn’t it the case that we chose to stay in our places, or that it is easier to blame men or bad bosses or ungrateful friends for what has become of us in life? The fact remains that there are unenlightened men who want to hold women down or keep them out of the upper echelons of power, and there are bad bosses. What we do with these situations, how we respond to them, is what ultimately leads us to happiness or un-happiness. I don't have to be unkind or get angry in order to deal with them; it's a choice. I have to admit that I have reacted angrily to situations that may have worked out better had I not done so. Emotional freedom; for me--not wasting energy on people and issues that drain me and suck the life out of me (emotional vampirism). Not being angry at myself and others for things I haven't been clear about up until now. Who knew emotional freedom (how you yourself define it) could be so important for our well-being? The author states clearly that she doubts that beliefs govern all of our feelings. But she knows for certain that what you believe plays a strong and overlooked role in everything you feel. So if you ‘believe’ that you should listen yet once more to an emotional vampire, or accept psychological abuse at the hands of a bad boss—in other words, if you believe that you should be a victim—you will choose to be one. It makes sense to me.

Things I didn't know about the Hudson River

I’m reading a very good book about the Hudson River entitled The Hudson: America's River by Frances Dunwell, and it’s been a real eye-opener so far. I’m only about a fifth of the way through the book, and am amazed at what I have learned about the river’s history as well as about American history. The river’s usefulness as a strategic waterway coincides with the early history and development of New York and neighboring states. You might think that I would remember what we were taught as students about the founding and evolution of America, the American Revolution, and the importance of the Hudson River in those occurrences. I cannot remember much emphasis being placed on the importance of the Hudson River by our teachers. The focus was rather on Revolutionary war heroes such as George Washington and the early American presidents, the Constitution, and so forth. As a companion piece to help me when I forget my American history, I purchased Paul S. Boyer’s American History—A Very Short Introduction; in the preface he writes “This brief introduction to the vast topic of U.S. history avoids either an excessively upbeat, rose-tinted approach or an unduly negative one”. That’s exactly the sort of book I want, so I’m looking forward to delving into it. Just give me the facts and let me make up my own mind about what transpired at that time in my country’s history.

Dunwell’s book presents a very complete picture of the historical events at that time as well as interesting facts about the river. So what have I learned so far that I never knew about the Hudson River before? I didn’t know it was a fjord, nor did I know that it was a tidal river. I also didn’t know how many different types of fish there are in the river. It was an important strategic waterway during the American Revolution, for both the British and the Americans. It also has a reputation as a pirate river (!), since the famous pirate Captain Kidd made his home along the Hudson. Here are just a few of the many excerpts from the book that I’ve highlighted: 

• Geologists refer to the Hudson as a fjord—a valley cut by glacial ice, then flooded by the sea.
• The Hudson is a mere 315 miles in length………A traveler from the Hudson’s marshy source, at Lake Tear of the Clouds, to its briny chop in New York Bay can witness the full sweep of American history and ideas and the relationship of people to the environment with which this heritage is so deeply intertwined.
• The Hudson is the last estuary on the East Coast of North America and perhaps in the entire North Atlantic drainage that still retains strong spawning stocks of all its historical fish species.
• …….the river…..welcomes seasonal oceanic visitors: Atlantic sturgeon, American shad, blueback herring, and striped bass.
• Resident fish, like perch, share the river with ocean fish that require fresh or brackish water to spawn—such as alewives, shad, herring, striped bass, and sturgeon.
• On the Hudson, tidewater extends more than 150 miles inland, nearly half of the river’s 315-mile length. Twice a day, the Hudson flows downstream like any other river would do. However, at slack tide, the tidal portion becomes still, and during flood tide, the flow of water actually reverses, moving north.
• The Mohican people called the Hudson Muhheahkunnuk, or Mohicanituck, meaning ‘great waters or sea, which are constantly in motion, either flowing or ebbing’……
• During the decades that the Dutch claimed the river as the central waterway of their colony (1609-1664), they emerged as the world’s leading sea power…….
• The reputation of the Hudson as a pirate river would become deeply imprinted with the story of Captain Kidd. …..Captain Kidd, a respected Manhattan sea captain who had a history of trading with pirates and knew where to find them. Kidd set sail from New York in 1696 and headed for Madagascar, the gathering place of pirates, but he soon turned to piracy himself……..Kidd and his crew raided many merchant ships…….On the island of Santo Domingo, Kidd left the Quedah Merchant and purchased a small sloop, which he filled with gold and jewels before setting off for his home port on the Hudson. However, Lord Bellomont, one of the investors in Kidd’s mission, turned the captain in when he landed at Boston and sent him to England to stand trial. Kidd was hanged in England in 1701. The fate of Kidd’s treasure remains a mystery.

I’ll be adding to this list from time to time, as I come further in the book. Needless to say, I’m enjoying learning about this river that was a major part of my growing up. We spent hours as teenagers walking around the estates that overlook the river--Rockwood Estate and Lyndhurst, or going to the beach at Kingsland Point in North Tarrytown (now Sleepy Hollow). I’m including a photo I took of the river when I visited the West Point Military Academy in the summer of 2011 together with my sister Renata and her husband Tim. It will give you an idea of how lovely the river and its surroundings really are.

A Christmas poem

I have been writing poetry for years, and just recently came upon this poem that I wrote when I was a teenager. I thought it might be a good poem for the Christmas season. 

Silent Stars

Wander across sea and sky--

Stars nightborne in flight.

Carry on across all time--

Centuries ago began your light.

Go on and move into the night.

Your silence is heard then,

Your light has touched all men.

And once upon ago two thousand years,

You shone upon no ordinary man. 

copyright 2011 Parables and Voices
P.M. De Angelis

Why I love the story of Jane Eyre

One of the best things I did last weekend was to watch the most recent film adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre from 2011 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1229822/) with Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre and Michael Fassbender as Mr. Rochester. I was completely emotional by the end of the film; I know how the story ends so there were no plot surprises, but the quality and intensity of the acting by Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender were just that overwhelming. Michael Fassbender was a wonderful surprise as Mr. Rochester; I have seen him in Prometheus and Fish Tank previously, and he is Mr. Rochester, David and Conor respectively, all completely different people, a testament to his acting abilities. He managed to impart a real humanity to Mr. Rochester, a humanity that I have not felt as strongly in other Mr. Rochesters. You feel sorry for him and for his predicament, even though you understand that he will suffer for his willfully deceiving Jane about his being married to a mad woman whom he is unable to divorce. By the time he tells her the truth, on her wedding day; you are hoping that Jane will forgive him because you know he is truly sorry for lying to her. But being the moral, proud and wise young woman that she is, she tells him that she will not live with him without being married and she leaves him and Thornfield Hall behind. As fate would have it, a tragedy occurs that ensures that she will finally be able to marry Mr. Rochester, but it was not the tragedy that made her return to Thornfield. It was her recognition of her own humanity and need for love; she gained the insight (inner sight) she needed to understand that she had found real love with Mr. Rochester and that she could not live in a passionless marriage with St John Rivers. She had to marry a man she loved. Her return to Mr. Rochester was actually an acknowledgment that she would live with him regardless of his marital situation as he had initially proposed once she found out he was already married. As it turns out; during her separation from Mr. Rochester, his wife burned down Thornfield Hall and committed suicide thereafter, but Jane is unaware of this when she returns to Thornfield. Mr. Rochester has lost his eyesight due to the fire and must depend upon those around him for help. When Jane returns to him, you understand that he has gained the ability to be grateful, and is no longer the proud and desperate man he once was. No matter how many times I’ve read the book or seen the different Jane Eyre films and TV series through the years, I am always moved by this story—it’s impossible not to love it. 

From the minds of children

The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten ran an article about The Monster Engine in its weekend magazine of February 17th. I'm posting the link to The Monster Engine website so you can see what Dave Devries, who started it, does, as well as his amazing artwork based on the drawings of children. And not just any drawings, but drawings of what scares them. Some of them scared me! Check it out.

http://www.themonsterengine.com/

He also has a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/TheMonsterEngine.DaveDeVries

Recognizing passive-aggressive behavior in workplace leaders

From time to time, I've decided I will present some excerpts from my book on passive-aggressive bosses in my blog posts. As I've mentioned previously, I've gotten a fair amount of feedback and comments on my book, which tells me that the problem of passive-aggressive bosses in the workplace is a fairly widespread problem. So why not share some of my views with you, and hopefully you will share yours with me and with others. The problem needs to be 'aired' in the workplace and talked about. My new question is the following: is this a managerial survival mechanism? Has the modern workplace become so complicated and confusing that these are the tactics that bosses must adopt in order to survive? If so, it speaks badly for the future of modern workplaces. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Blindsided--Recognizing and Dealing with Passive-Aggressive Leadership in the Workplace (these are just a few of the traits I have listed and discussed: http://www.amazon.com/Blindsided-Recognizing-Dealing-Passive-Aggressive-Leadership-Workplace/dp/1442159200/ref=tmm_pap_title_0). 

How do you feel at the hands of a passive-aggressive boss or co-worker? The word “blindsided” comes to mind. The definition of blindside is “to hit unexpectedly from or as if from the blind side; to surprise unpleasantly” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ blindsided). Thus blindsided describes how one might feel when dealing with a passive-aggressive boss. How many times have you come away from meetings or interactions with a boss or another co-worker, feeling as though you have been hit by a car that came out of nowhere? You just didn’t see it coming. How many times have you been the butt of a joke that isn’t funny or the recipient of undeserved comments, sarcasm and put-downs, and how many times have you wondered about the reason for this behavior? How many times have you ended up feeling used, duped, stabbed in the back, or the victim of dishonest behavior? How many times have you heard that same boss or co-worker describe himself or herself as a nice person (translated--one who tries to help others all the time, never says no to any request, tries to avoid conflict at all costs, one who wants to be liked by all, is not aggressive, never gets angry, is not tyrannical, is not verbally or physically abusive)?

A summary of some of the attitudes and behaviors that characterize passive-aggressive bosses (or co-workers) is presented in the next section. Using the traits and behaviors summarized here, I hope it will become somewhat easier to identify what some might call fairly typical behavior in the workplace as passive-aggressive behavior.

Attitudes/personality traits and corresponding behaviors/patterns of behavior in passive-aggressive leaders

1. Dishonest communicators

Communication with employees is not direct or honest but rather indirect, dishonest, and ambiguous. Employees never get a clear sense of what was discussed, what conclusion was reached, what is expected of them, or what future strategy or plan was outlined. These types of bosses can talk non-stop but little of what they communicate is useful for employees or even remembered by the leaders themselves at future meetings. These leaders are poor listeners and poor communicators. They behave in an indecisive and impulsive manner, are forgetful, lack focus, and are unable to think long-term or systematically. They lack the skills needed to create an organized and rational plan of action for their employees.

2. Flip-floppers

These types of leaders say one thing and then do the other. They change their minds frequently and cannot take a decisive stand on an issue. They forget what was decided upon, which confuses and frustrates those who prefer working with rational thinkers and leaders with the ability to strategize and make long-term plans.

3. Conflict-avoiders

Passive-aggressive leaders dislike conflicts, arguments, disagreements, overt shows of anger, or confrontations. They become uncomfortable or embarrassed by shows of emotion, especially anger. It is possible to recognize anger in them as their faces will redden when confronted and when they are told things they do not like to hear, but otherwise they rarely exhibit overt anger. They view themselves as diplomatic individuals, and many of them have an obsessive need to be well-liked or seen as nice people. They dislike being confronted or having their opinions challenged, but seldom respond with overt anger. Instead they will ‘punish’ employees who initiate discussions or debates (seen as conflicts or arguments). 

One more post for today--update on NaNoWriMo

Yes, I know, there have been a lot of posts from me today. Probably because the negativity and cynicism in my workplace challenges me to rise above them, and I do that by tapping into my creativity and writing myself free of what promises to drag me to hell. I promised I would keep you all updated on my progress with NaNoWriMo, or for those who have just started following A New Yorker in Oslo, the novel writing challenge called National Novel Writing Month. I didn't make it to 50,000 words by November 30th, but I did make it to 33,000 words (about 121 pages and counting). In other words, I'm getting there, and I will definitely finish my novel and publish it. Why? Because I think it's good. I will show it to a few other people before I do. What have I learned from it all? That it's fun to write. But that it's hard work too, especially when you get writer's block for a few days or when you sit and write for five hours at a time with no breaks. Writing can become obsessive, creative, frustrating, depressing (when you get it wrong), and exhilarating (when you get it right). And only you really 'know' the exact moment when you get it right. Little wonder that editors and authors develop such intimate relationships. I can only imagine one other person who might understand where I was when I was writing---and that would be an editor.

But what I learned about myself when writing my characters--that was the best of all. It's all true what published authors say--you get to know and like (or dislike) your characters. You get to know about the people who are buried deep within you. The characters you thought you would be able to write 'well' are the ones who end up disappearing into the woodwork, and the ones who emerge front and center are the characters who really live in your subconscious and who have been clamoring for a chance to climb out and test the waters. So I let them. They directed me in how to write them. Well, I had a few ideas of the situations I wanted to put them in, but I let them do the talking for me. And that seemed quite natural somehow.

Anyway, once I finish this novel, I will start on another, and also on a screenplay that I will be collaborating on with another woman. So we'll see where that takes us. One place it will take me intellectually and emotionally is far far away from the demoralized workplace I frequent each day. And thank God for that.

What M.Scott Peck Said

M. Scott Peck (1936-2005) was a psychiatrist and the best-selling author of a terrific book called The Road Less Traveled. I read it during the 1980s and it had a profound effect upon my life in terms of helping me deal with my life at that time and in making some necessary changes. I recommend it because it contains some real wisdom and advice on how to deal with life and its trials and joys.While Peck himself didn’t always live up to the high ideals he espoused for others (he didn’t always practice what he preached), he was an inspiration and a man of wisdom, perhaps all the more so for his failings and weaknesses, and he shared his wisdom and thoughts in his writings. 

·         “Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it. ”

·         “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”

·         “Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”

·         “Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.”

·         “Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional. The person who truly loves does so because of a decision to love. This person has made a commitment to be loving whether or not the loving feeling is present. ...Conversely, it is not only possible but necessary for a loving person to avoid acting on feelings of love.”

·         “We must be willing to fail and to appreciate the truth that often "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.”

·         Each one of us must make his own path through life. There are no self-help manuals, no formulas, no easy answers. The right road for one is the wrong road for another...The journey of life is not paved in blacktop; it is not brightly lit, and it has no road signs. It is a rocky path through the wilderness. ”

·          “The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior. ”

·         “Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity. ”

·          “You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time. ”

·         “It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. ”

·          “If we know exactly where we're going, exactly how to get there, and exactly what we'll see along the way, we won't learn anything. ”

·         “Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a PROFOUND tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there.”

·         “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”

·         “There is no worse bitterness than to reach the end of your life and realized you have not lived.”

How some companies go from good to great--a book by Jim Collins

I am reading the bestselling book ’Good To Great’ (published in 2001) by Jim Collins, who is the author of ‘Built To Last’, also a bestseller. I emphasize “bestselling” because they are books about the business world, and it surprises me that there is enough interest in the business world to guarantee a bestselling book. But apparently there is, and given the state of the economy during the past ten years, perhaps interest in these types of books is not that surprising. I for one find such books fascinating; I never get tired of reading about companies, their employees or leadership issues. Both books deal with companies, workplace leadership, greatness and longevity. ‘Good To Great’ discusses why some companies manage to become great companies starting from the level of good companies, but it also discusses mediocre and even bad companies and the likelihood of their achieving a ‘great’ status. I like the book so far because Collins is not just presenting his subjective opinions; he and his research team have done extensive research on what are considered to be great American companies, and have come up with some ideas as to why they became that way. They uncovered the qualities and characteristics of greatness—why some companies manage to become great while others don’t.

Here is his opening paragraph in Chapter 1: “Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life. The vast majority of companies never become great, precisely because the vast majority become quite good—and that is their main problem”. The opening paragraph draws you into the book and makes you want to explore the topic further. His premise is interesting. But what is a great company? How does Collins define ‘great’? His book is not a primer on how to get to greatness. It is more of a scientific treatise that describes the qualities of companies and of CEOs that have achieved greatness and maintained those results for at least fifteen years. And that by itself makes it an exceptionally interesting book, because it is steeped in objective research about the issue.

Here are some of the ideas that Collins brings up and discusses:

·         “In a good-to-great transformation, people are not your most important asset. The right people are”.

·         Who are the right people?  Collins writes: “The good-to-great companies placed greater weight on character attributes than on specific educational background, practical skills, specialized knowledge, or work experience. Not that specific knowledge or skills are unimportant, but they viewed these traits as more teachable (or at least learnable), whereas they believed dimensions like character, work ethic, basic intelligence, dedication to fulfilling commitments, and values are more ingrained (sounds like integrity and emotional intelligence are prized highly in both leaders and the right employees)

·         He argues for rigorousness in finding and keeping the right people and in letting go of the wrong people or shifting them to positions where they may be able to blossom.  It’s not about mass layoffs and ruthless treatment of employees. He says: “To let people languish in uncertainty for months or years, stealing precious time in their lives that they could use to move on to something else, when in the end they aren’t going to make it anyway—that would be ruthless. To deal with it right up front and let people get on with their lives—that is rigorous”.  He doesn’t argue against laying off specific people but he also discusses the possibility of shifting them to other positions to give them a chance to develop their true potential. This takes emotional intelligence and common sense on the part of company leaders in order to figure this out.

Collins also discusses ‘Level 5 leadership’, which he describes as a “paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will. Level 5 leaders are “ambitious….., but ambitious first and foremost for the company, not themselves”. They are “modest, self-effacing, understated, fanatically-driven, diligent, take responsibility for failures and give others the credit for success”. In my book, this is the definition of people with integrity and emotional intelligence. He is quite clear on one thing—that “every good-to-great company had Level 5 leadership during the pivotal transition years”; this conclusion is unequivocally supported by his team’s research data.

My questions are—why is there so little emotional intelligence in workplace leaders? Ditto for integrity and ethical character? Why aren’t they reading these kinds of books, or if they are, why aren’t they learning from them and putting their newfound knowledge into action? And why aren’t more potential Level 5 leaders being tapped for such positions? Why is it that there is so much mediocrity in workplace leaders at present? Potential Level 5 leaders are stifled into silence, bypassed, ignored, encouraged to leave or simply fired. Strange behavior on the part of companies whose visions are to be ‘the best (company, university, hospital, etc.) within the next few years’. I’m hoping for a renaissance of sorts—a new focus on integrity and emotional intelligence in workplace leaders.

The definition of success

I’ve been thinking about the definition of success lately. It’s a subject that has always interested me, and then a friend loaned me the book Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. He is the author of the earlier books The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. I am nearly finished with the book and I have to say it’s one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read. The author has a way of drawing you into his world; he is a good storyteller, and that makes him a good author. He is also a best-selling author, in other words, a successful author, and I have to wonder as he wrote this book, if he wasn’t wondering a bit about what made him so successful. His books fill a void—call it the void of interesting heretofore unknown facts that become wildly-interesting stories—possibly because he weaves those facts into a coherent story. He sees synergies and connections in those facts that others don’t see. I’d call him a true researcher because of his intelligence, curiosity and enthusiasm for the subjects he studies and writes about. His books are often placed in the genre ‘psychology’. I guess that’s as good a genre as any, but this book is not a self-help book. It is an exploratory philosophical book about what makes successful people successful; there are no 10 steps to follow on the path to success, no guarantees for success.

He defines outliers as people ‘who do things that are out of the ordinary’. In statistics, outliers are usually the data points that are outside other values in a set of data—values that are often far away from the others, and statisticians often don’t like outliers. They would in fact prefer that they were not there, because their existence can mess up an otherwise perfectly good data set. So statisticians have ways of dealing with outliers. Gladwell has decided to focus on them, because they are the people who lie outside the norm. I won’t spoil the book for you, but his premise is that no successful person is ‘self-made’. We hang on to that myth though as though our life depended on it. If I could sum up his view, it would be that successful people achieved their success due to a combination of factors: intelligence; circumstances (family history and social standing); opportunities that were seized, not ignored; happenstance (being in the right place at the right time--also in a historical perspective); and of course hard work (the ten thousand hour rule). We like to think that successful people were ‘discovered’ and that on the basis of one song or one story that they became successful. But that’s not the case, and he demolishes that view very elegantly.

I’ve thought a lot about success during the past year with all the tumult at my workplace. Westernized society’s standard definition of success is clear—top jobs, large salaries, and power— often involving rags-to-riches stories or self-made man/woman stories. But when I look at my own workplace, one thing is completely clear. None of the people who made it to the top and who are successful in the standard sense made it without help. They had support networks, people rooting for them, mentors, call it what you will. They had political connections--they did not make it alone. And those who think that they did are living in a fantasy world. This does not negate the fact that they are intelligent, worthy of their success, have worked hard, and have a lot to offer. It simply says that they also had crucial help at a point when the opportunities for them to move up presented themselves (their personal windows of opportunity). If they were not aware of the opportunities, they had mentors who showed them that they were there. Mentors are important. I would venture to say that mentors are important at all ages. It is not just the young who need them, although they need them perhaps the most. But older people in the workplace need them too. They need impartial, unbiased, objective people with whom to discuss their careers and workplace situations. If you have never had them, you don’t know what you’ve missed until you hit the glass ceiling or find that your career path is moving laterally, not upward. You don’t know that you’ve made critical mistakes until it’s too late. Mentors might have been able to redirect your thoughts or plans. But of course this presupposes that you buy into the standard definition of success—that you are successful if you have a top job, earn a lot of money, or have a lot of power. It’s easy to see why most people want this type of success. It makes living in our society much easier. If you are wealthy, you command respect that poorer people don’t get. And if you think this is not true, think about the last time poor people were really ‘listened’ to, anywhere on the planet. For every Mother Teresa in the world, there are millions of poor people who command no respect.

There is nothing wrong with the standard definition of success. It’s nice to be able to have enough money to do the things you want, to live your life comfortably, to have some ‘say’ in what goes on at your workplace. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is only when you have achieved some measure of standard success that you are in a position to help others—as a mentor or as a benefactor. But still, I wonder if successful people are happy. I’m guessing that many of them are—because they have reached the top in their chosen field, and that by itself must give them a sense of satisfaction or completion. It’s like a sports star who has won his or her competition—that feeling of winning. But of course once at the top, you can never really rest. You must keep going. There are always others waiting in the wings to replace you. There are also unhappy successful people, and they interest me, perhaps more than the happy ones. I wonder why they are unhappy if they’ve achieved everything they wanted to achieve in their work life. The answer has to be that work life alone is not the be-all and the end-all of life. If you don’t have a good personal life—family and friends who see you through the good and the bad times, you don’t have much. I’ve watched successful men in my workplace get old, retire, and lose their status and power. Some of them tackled it well; others did not. I wonder if those who tackled it well were those with a good family life. Because if workplace success is the only way you define your life, you are bound to be unhappy. And there are the other scenarios that lead to unhappiness that are out of your control. There are unfortunately just as many unhappy twists of fates in the workplace as there are happy ones; I have seen bad things happen to good people who were successful in the standard sense. They were at the top one day and at the bottom the next. Not literally of course, but it seems that way. What did they do wrong? Did they do anything wrong? Is this just how workplace life is? Do you need to learn to roll with the punches as a successful person? Are successful people good at doing this? These are all interesting questions. In any case, the vagaries and mystery of success will keep researchers and writers preoccupied for years to come.