Wisdom, Leadership & Success: Recent Episodes
Pete Bowen
What are the three best values for success and happiness?
It’s simple.
Just live three values: Seek Wisdom, Practice Love and Get Results until they become habits, part of your very being, so you naturally develop the high trust, high performance relationships that bring success and happiness.
That’s it. Covenant Leadership. It will give you the best chance for success and happiness in all areas of your life.
How does it work?
Success
At work, the more your clients-customers trust you, the more business they give you. The more your employees trust you, the more commitment, productivity, and performance you get. Combine more business with higher performance, and you have a big advantage in the marketplace.
In non-profits or public service, higher performance means better services at a lower cost. In the military, it means winning more battles with fewer casualties.
At home, higher trust and performance means better relationships with your spouse and kids. Raise your kids with Covenant Leadership, and you give them the best chance for happiness and success in their lives.
Happiness
The Harvard Study on Adult Development confirms what you already know, that happiness in life comes from good relationships. People in strong relationships are not only happier, but also healthier and live longer.
The Key to Success and Happiness
The key to happiness and success is high trust, high performance relationships. How do you develop the best relationships?
The more people trust your wisdom, the more they know that you love them, and the more they know that you get results, the higher trust and higher performance your relationships will be.
Seek Wisdom, Practice Love, and Get Results.
Why three values and not four or more? Because most people can’t remember or do more than three things.
Wisdom
Wisdom is the knowledge that comes with experience.
When you learn how to drive, you are told that pressing the brake pedal will make your car will slow down and stop. But that knowledge about the brake pedal does not make you good at using the brake.
To get good at braking, you have to practice using the brake 10,000 times in different kinds of traffic and weather conditions. The more you practice, the more it becomes a habit, part of who you are—your character. The more it becomes a habit, the more situational awareness, vision, and wisdom you develop about using the brake.
Knowledge about something is nice, but wisdom that comes from experience is much more important.
Who do you trust more, the pilot who knows about flying or the pilot who has completed 500 flights? Do you trust and hire the doctor who knows about surgery or the doctor who has completed 100 successful surgeries?
Wisdom is the knowledge you get when you practice something until it becomes a habit and part of your character.
The more people trust your wisdom, the stronger and higher performance your relationships will be. Seek Wisdom.
Love
Some people think relationships are based in power. Others think relationships are transactional.
The best, highest performance relationships, however, are based in love—agape love.
Agape love is the deepest kind of love—when you are willing to sacrifice yourself for another. The total love of a parent for a child. The willingness of soldiers to die for each other on the battlefield.
Agape love is the self-sacrificing love that inspires the deepest commitment and strongest relationships possible. Practice Love so it becomes a habit, part of your being.
Results
When you Seek Wisdom and Practice Love, you have the best chance to Get Results.
The more people trust that you get results, the stronger and higher performance your relationships.
A basketball player has to make the shot at the end of the game. The salesperson has to close the deal. The CFO has to produce accurate financials. Managers have to make their numbers. The tech has to fix the problem.
As a parent, you have to keep your children safe.
https://youtu.be/hZaWFsV32HI
A lot of people get anxious because they don't know how to start a conversation with someone new.
With Covenant Leadership, if you can remember just 3 things, you can master a simple approach to starting great conversations and relationships with anyone you meet. Whether it is at work, in the community, or even with a romantic interest.
Whether you are comfortable starting conversations with strangers or someone who gets anxious talking to someone new, this simple covenant leadership approach can help. It will get you comfortable meeting someone new. It will get your conversation rolling. It will help you build high trust relationships. And it works in any situation
Whether you are at work, in the community, or even meeting a romantic interest, all you have to do is remember 3 questions.
Before we get to the questions, it is important to set up the conversation correctly.
Turn your body to face the person you are talking to Actively listen to them and remember what they say Make them feel like they are the only person in the room
Three Key Questions to Start a Conversation
Now to the three questions.
The first question is: What is your story?
It is an open question that allows them to respond however they feel most comfortable. It tells you who they are and where they come from. It gives you a starting point to ask other questions. If they talk about family or friends—especially kids—make a special note of that.
The second question is: What is important to you at work?
You might not ask that question in such a direct way. You might ask “What are you focused on at work?” or “What are the biggest challenges you face?”
The point is that if you can help someone solve a problem, achieve a goal, or address an issue at work, you will build trust in your relationship.
The third question is, “What is your passion?” What do they do for fun?
It is a great question because you get insight into the person and what they love to do, and most people enjoy talking about their passion.
You also get to learn about something new, which broadens your knowledge. I've learned a lot about puzzles, salmon fishing, hunting, surfing, international dart competitions, auto restoration, and desert car racing. It becomes a great starting point for future conversations. “So, how is the salmon fishing going?” And it gets them comfortable talking to you. It shows them that you care.
The last thing—and it is important—make sure you care enough to write it all down in your contact database. You might not see that person for a year or two—or even four years—but if you remember key things about them, it will show them that you really care.
That’s it.
It is pretty simple. Start by focusing on them.
Turn your body to face them Actively listen to and remember what they say Make them feel like they are the only person in the room
Then ask to find out about the three things:
What is your story? What is important at work? What is your passion?
Why does this approach work so well?
Part of it is that it is simple, works in any situation, and is easy to remember and master.
The biggest reason it works well is that you are practicing love for another.
Remember, Covenant Leadership is grounded in the fundamental truth that happiness and success come from good relationships.
The more people trust your wisdom, know that you love them, and know that you get results, the higher trust and higher performance your relationships will become.
One of the best ways to practice love for others is to make them the absolute center of your attention. Actively listen to them. Learn and care about them.
Like everything else in Covenant Leadership, practice love until it becomes a habit—part of your very being. You will get good at it. You will get comfortable doing it. And you will naturally build high trust, high performance relationships with the people you meet.
There's something you can start doing right now that will profoundly change your life and the lives of those you love.
It will give you the best chance for happiness and success in life, and it will change the world while you're doing it.
It doesn't cost a nickel. It doesn't require any special gear or a membership.
What can you do that will profoundly change your life?
Seek Every Opportunity to Practice Love
It is simple. Starting right now, go through your day looking for every opportunity to practice love so that it becomes a habit. Part of your character. Part of your very being.
It will make you a better person, a better spouse and parent at home, and a more successful leader at work. It will give you the best chance for happiness and success in life. And you'll change the world while doing it.
If you think that talking about love is too soft or sensitive or touchy feely, then catch up. It is a skill set just like any other. It is measurable, and it is the thing that can have the single biggest impact on every area of your life, especially your work success.
When we think about practicing love, we tend to think it is beneficial because it makes other people feel good. It sets a good example. And gee, if everybody practiced love, wouldn't the world be a better place?
All these are focused on the benefits practicing love brings to other people. When we do something nice for somebody else, we tend to think about it in terms of the impact on them and whether they are grateful for our kindness or not.
Practice Love Because It Makes You Better
All of these are good reasons for practicing love, but there is a better, deeper, more powerful reason to practice love.
Practicing love profoundly changes you, no matter how the other person reacts. When you practice love over and over, it eventually becomes a habit, part of your character, part of your very being. That changes you.
That becomes the foundation for all your relationships in life: the high trust, high performance relationships you want at work and at home; the relationships that bring happiness and success; and the relationships that change the world. And most important, it becomes the foundation for the relationship that you have with yourself.
The key is to go through your day consciously looking for every opportunity you can find to practice love.
Sometimes we talk about doing random acts of kindness and we see news reports about the impact that can have on people's lives.
But think about the tremendous impact you could have on yourself and everyone around you if you started every day consciously looking for every opportunity to practice love for other people.
Go Through Your Day Collecting Wins
It doesn't cost you nickel. It doesn't require any workout gear. You can start doing it right now.
Every time you practice love for another—that is a win. Focus your day on collecting wins.
Look for opportunities to practice love until the search becomes a habit that you carry throughout your day.
What are some ways you can practice love at home with the spouse and kids? You can start by waking up with a great attitude. Find a morning task that your spouse normally does—maybe it's making lunch for the kids—and do it for them. Write your spouse an unexpected love note.
When you are headed to work, you can be courteous driver. Let people in your lane. Don't drive aggressively. Give up the closest parking space or a seat on the train. Hold the door open for people.
One of the most powerful ways to practice love is to actively listen to the people you are talking to. Make them the center of your universe. Offer to help people with things. Give somebody a compliment.
Want to take practicing love up a notch at work? Be the one who does the dishes or cleans out the refrigerator in the break room. Do the jobs no one else wants to do. Don’t do these things because people will appreciate you for it. Don’t worry that people will take advantage of you.
How can you achieve happiness and success in life?
Some people say happiness is all about how much money you have. Other people say happiness is about your social status or education level.
The best science tells us something very different.
In an earlier blog, we talked about the meaning of life and your purpose in life, which is happiness, fulfillment. In this blog, we’re going to talk about how you can achieve happiness and success in life, and change the world while doing it.
We will keep it simple. Here is an overview:
Overview
Happiness in life comes from good relationships. There are three things you can start doing today to build the good, strong relationships that bring happiness. Seek wisdom, practice love, and get results.
Good, high trust, high performance relationships also give you the best chance for success in life—whether that is leadership success at work, leading your family at home, or success as a good citizen in the community.
Finally, when you are a good person with strong relationships, you have the best chance to help make our world a better place.
We call this overall approach to life Covenant Leadership.
Happiness Comes from Good Relationships
So, where can we find happiness in life?
The science is very clear. For more than 80 years, Harvard has been conducting the Study on Adult Development, and it tells us that happiness doesn't come from money or social status or your education level.
Happiness comes from good relationships. That's it.
Good relationships don’t just bring happiness in life, they also help you live years longer and feel healthier too.
The director who led the Harvard study for 30 years said, “Happiness in life comes from good relationships. Full stop.”
We should not be surprised by the results of the Harvard study. We are made for relationship. Relationship is hard-wired into our DNA. Relationship is fundamental to our biology.
If you give an infant all the food and water she needs, but you don't give the infant love and physical affection, 4 out of 10 will die. Half of the survivors will have severe psychological challenges.
What is the worst way to bully someone? It's not to yell at them or physically abuse them. The worst way to bully somebody is to shun them. To deny them relationship.
What is the worst place in prison? Solitary confinement. It deprives the prisoner of relationship. Over time, the lack of relationship can drive prisoners in solitary crazy.
Think about your loved ones. How good does it make you feel when you spend time with them? How bad do you feel when you break up?
When we face the end of life, no one says that they wish they had spent more time at work. Everyone wishes they had made more time for loved ones.
Happiness in life comes from good relationships. We are neurologically hard-wired for relationship. It is fundamental. It is built into our DNA.
Three Things Build Good Relationships
There are three things that build strong relationships. We call them the Covenant Virtues.
The more people trust your wisdom, the more they know that you love them, and the more they know that you get results, the stronger your relationships.
So, there are three things you can do, starting today, to build the strong relationships that will bring you happiness and success. Seek wisdom, practice love, and get results.
Three Areas of Relationships
If you are going to get good at those Covenant Virtues, you need places to practice them. There are three areas of relationship that you can do that.
The first place to practice those virtues is in your relationship with yourself. The second is in your personal relationships with your family and friends. The last place you can practice these is in your relationships at work and in the community.
It is straightforward. Seek wisdom, practice love, and get results in your relationships with yourself, with family and friends, at work and in the community. You will develop the strong relationships that bring...
What is the Meaning of Life?
What's the meaning of life? What's your purpose in life?
Some people say there is no meaning to life. Other people say that the meaning of life is whatever you want it to be.
But I think there's a much better answer.
Welcome to Real Talk About Life where we use Covenant Leadership to develop the relationships that bring happiness and success in life, and change the world.
What is Happiness?
What's the meaning of life? What's your purpose in life? The answer is simple: Happiness. Fulfillment. It's that deep sense of contentment or satisfaction you get when you accomplish something big.
Maybe you set a weight loss goal and, after a lot of dieting and a lot of hard work in the gym, you achieved it and you feel good about yourself. That's fulfillment.
Maybe you're going to run a marathon or a 10K and you spend a lot of miles on the road getting ready for it. When you finish that 10K or that marathon, you're totally exhausted. You're totally spent, but you look back on it and you feel good about it. You feel good about yourself—that's fulfillment.
Maybe you're on a sports team that wins a championship, or you are part of a work team that accomplishes a big project. You bond together with your teammates to achieve that and you feel good about it. It's a big achievement. You feel happy. Fulfilled.
Happiness is About Relationships
Most of the time we think of fulfillment or happiness in terms of achievements, something we've accomplished. At a deeper level, happiness is really about relationships.
Think about that. Some of the most fulfilling, happiest times we have, are when we are simply spending time with others—a friend, a child, a spouse, someone we love. It is not that you are doing anything particular. It's just spending time with them.
If fulfillment and happiness have to do with relationships, then what about achieving individual goals like running a marathon or losing weight or quitting smoking? What do those have to do with the relationship?
The answer is that it did involve relationship. You did it in relationship with yourself.
You had to motivate yourself, lead yourself through a difficult challenge, to the achievement. The more difficult the challenge, the happier and more fulfilled you feel. Happiness always involves relationship.
Happiness in Life
Those are all descriptions of happiness and fulfillment in specific situations. What about life?
Happiness in life is when you look back over your whole life and you feel satisfied. Content that you did a good job. You lived a good life.
Happiness is that deep sense of fulfillment of satisfaction that you get when you achieve something big or spend time with another. Happiness often includes achievements. It always involves relationship, happiness in life.
Happiness in life is when you look back over your whole life and you feel content, satisfied, that you did a good job. That you lived a good life.
Want to learn more about how to achieve happiness and success in life, and change our world while doing it? Check out our website for more on Covenant Leadership.
From our earlier episodes, we know that happiness in life comes from good, high-trust, covenant relationships.
To develop good relationships, practice the three Covenant Virtues: Seek wisdom, practice love, and get results. The more people trust your wisdom, that you love them and that you can get results, the better your relationships and the stronger your leadership.
The more you practice these virtues, the more they will become habits and part of your character. You won’t just develop relationships that bring happiness, you’ll also become a good leader at work, in your family and in life.
There are three areas of relationship where you can practice the Covenant Virtues. They are your relationship with yourself, your relationship with family and friends, and the relationships you have at work and in the community.
In this episode, we’ll take a look at your relationship with yourself. It’s incredibly important because it is the starting point for all your other relationships. Your Relationship with Yourself. One of the things that differentiates human beings from other creatures is that humans are self-conscious. We think about ourselves. We talk to ourselves. We might be happy or unhappy with ourselves. We are in relationship with ourselves.
The relationship you have with yourself is critical because it is the foundation for all your other relationships in life. The stronger your relationship with yourself, the stronger your other relationships can be.
Like other relationships, your relationship with yourself is all about trust. To trust yourself, you must trust your wisdom and knowledge about yourself. You must love and appreciate yourself. You must have self-confidence and the ability to lead yourself.
Let’s take a look at your relationship with yourself in terms of the Covenant Virtues. Building the best relationship possible with yourself means reflecting on questions like those below. Seek Wisdom Wisdom is the combination of knowledge and character. Do you know yourself? Do you trust your own character?
How is Your Self-Knowledge?
How well do you know yourself? What kind of thinker are you? Are you more analytic or intuitive? What kinds of information do you need to make decisions? How well do you perform under pressure? What makes you happy? What makes you cranky? Do you have healthy emotional responses? Do your emotions overwhelm you? Do you suppress your emotions?
How is Your Character?
What are your good habits and character strengths? What are your bad habits and character challenges? How well does your perception of yourself match what wise family and friends think about you?
Practice Love You can’t fully love other people unless you first love yourself.
How Do You Feel About Yourself?
How do you feel about your:
Mental strength? Physical fitness? Appearance? Ability to make friends and have relationships?
What are you proud of about yourself? What are you happy about yourself? What makes you feel sad, disappointed, or embarrassed about yourself?
Do You Love Yourself?
What qualities make you the unique, one-of-a-kind person that you are? Have you accepted the things about yourself that you cannot change? Are you proud of what you’ve accomplished and who you are?
Get Results To get results, you must have strong self-confidence and self-leadership. Can you lead yourself through difficult situations and get results?
How Is You Self-Confidence?
Are you confident that you can achieve things? Do you over-question yourself to the point that it undermines your performance? Are you over-confident? What are the differences between self-confidence, pride and arrogance?
How Much Do You Trust Yourself?
In what situations do you trust yourself? In what situations do you not trust yourself?
How Much Self-Leadership Do You Have?
We’ve all read dozens of articles giving us eight things we can do to be a better leader or parent or person.
Most of them seem like good tips. By the time I read three or four articles, I have a list of 25-30 things I am supposed to do to be a better leader. And that’s after just a few days of reading.
Maybe you are one of those people who can remember and do 25 things at the same time. If so, more power to you. I am not one of those people.
I’ve learned The Power of Three. It’s simple. Most people can only remember and act on three things at the same time.
It’s an important concept. All too often we give people a list of four or more things to remember and act on—and then wonder why things don’t work as intended. It’s much better to stick to 2-3 things.
If your organization has more than three core values, you’re probably not getting the alignment, performance, engagement and productivity that you could.
Let’s be clear. It is possible to memorize lists with more than three items. What people can’t do well is remember and act on more than three things at the same time.
A little story. I was doing in-depth interviews with managers at a company about a variety of topics including their culture and values. The company had five core values. As part of the interview, I asked each manager if they knew the company values.
Out of 60 interviews, only four managers knew all five values. Those four managers were close friends who worked in the same regional office.
What about the other 56 interviews? Everyone remembered 2-3 values, but at four values, retention dropped off a cliff.
In a later part of the interview, I asked each manager what leadership principles they thought were most important. In almost every case, the corporate values they remembered were the same as the leadership principles they shared.
The point is that people can only remember and act on a maximum of three things.
You can give people 10 values if you want, but they’ll likely remember and act on only 2-3 of them. Giving 100 people five values means that you’ll get 100 different versions of 2-3 values that each of them remembers and acts on. Instead of developing a consistent, unified, high-performance culture, you’ll get mush.
If you have a list of more than three things that need to be accomplished, layer them. Choose the 2-3 most important items to learn and then, when you are very good at them, add in the next layer of 2-3 items.
Take learning how to drive a car. When I was teaching my daughter to drive, I didn’t start her on a busy freeway or even a residential street. We didn’t work on steering and speed and navigation and…
Instead, we started in a large parking lot. For 30 minutes, all my daughter did was take her foot off the brake and put it on the brake. Brake on. Brake off. She wasn’t allowed to touch the gas pedal. When we ran out of parking lot, she was allowed to turn the car in the opposite direction.
She focused on just two things: braking and steering. Lesson One in driving was all about getting that first layer, that foundation, put in place. When she got good at that, we went back to that parking lot and she was allowed to use the gas pedal.
She focused on getting good at 2-3 skills for one layer before we moved on to the 2-3 skills in the next layer. Over time, we added layer after layer, 2-3 skills at a time, to make her the safe driver she is today.
People can remember simple lists of more than three things, but people can only remember and act on 2-3 things at the same time.
If your organization is pushing more than three core values, consider improving your culture and performance by consolidating them into three. I recommend the core values of Seek Wisdom, Practice Love and Get Results. For more on that, check out my blogs on Wisdom and Practicing Love – Getting Results.
That’s the Power of Three.
Welcome to the sixth episode in our series on how you can achieve happiness and success in life.
From our earlier episodes, we know that Happiness and success in life come from high-trust, covenant relationships.
In our last episode, we said that the best way of developing good relationships is to live the three virtues:
Seek Wisdom Practice Love Get Results
The more people trust your wisdom, that you love them, and that you get things done, the stronger your relationships.
In our last episode we also talked about what wisdom is and why its critical for your success.
In this episode, we’ll go deeper into the other two important virtues—Practice Love and Get Results.
PRACTICE LOVE
Back in the early 2000’s, I spent some time as the Ethics Officer for the Los Angeles Unified School District. The district had gone through a major scandal and was doing some reform. I was 36 years old. This was a senior position in a multi-billion-dollar agency, and my boss Hal gave me a great opportunity.
It was a fantastic experience. Hal taught me about the law, government, politics, unions and leadership—all good stuff. What made Hal a great leader however, was that he genuinely cared about his people. We all worked harder for Hal because we knew he cared about us.
Twenty years later, many of us are still friends with Hal.
How did I know that Hal cared about me? He showed it several ways.
Hal believed in me. He asked for my input on major issues within the broader legal office. He actively listened to what I said. In my area of responsibility, he gave me the authority to make district-wide decisions. When I was attacked, Hal backed me without hesitation—even when it cost him politically.
Hal treated me like a teammate, not a minion. Hal really focused on doing the right thing for kids and the district instead of what was politically expedient.
Finally, Hal took an active interest in my personal and career development. He challenged me to continuously improve my ideas, writing and work. He made sure that I learned important lessons about leadership, politics and big organizations that I could use throughout my life.
I picked up a lot of knowledge from Hal, but more important, I learned the power of genuine care for others. Care doesn’t just get better performance from people. Care transforms both the person giving and the person receiving the care. Remember that.
My junior high school wrestling coach, Jim, had a big impact on my life. The impact wasn’t that he taught me a better wrestling move. It was because he took the time to care. More than 40 years later, we’re still friends.
Think back to the people who made the biggest differences in your life. Did they make that difference by teaching you a better way to throw a ball or do a math equation? Or did they make a difference because they cared?
We have been talking about people caring for each other, so why is it practice love instead of care about others?
It is because love is the deepest kind of caring you can have for another. Love gets the most commitment. Love builds the strongest relationship bonds.
Love-based covenant relationships are deeper, stronger and more committed than contract/transactional relationships or power-based relationships.
Of course, it’s really important to know what we mean by love.
Love is much more than a feeling. Love is taking action to do what is best for another.
The ancient Greeks recognized different types of love including philia and agape.
Philia is brotherly love. That’s why Philadelphia is known as the City of Brotherly Love. Philia is a mutual friendship where you care about the other person’s well-being—what is best for them.
Agape love is deeper, self-sacrificing love. It is when you are willing to die for another.
Love doesn’t just benefit the person receiving the love. When you practice love, it transforms you.
You become what you do. When you do something over and over,
It’s simple. Happiness and success come from high-trust, covenant relationships. We know that from our previous blogs-podcasts.
So, what is the best way to develop good relationships?
Just do three things:
Seek Wisdom Practice Love Get Results
The more people trust your wisdom, that you love them, and that you get things done, the stronger your relationships.
In this episode, we’re going to focus on wisdom and why its critical to your success.
SEEK WISDOM
Wisdom is the knowledge you need to be good at something—whether that is painting a house, raising a family or leading a business.
In the broadest sense, wisdom is the knowledge you need to live a good, successful and happy life.
Wisdom includes common sense, and the ability to make good judgments and carry out good actions.
Wisdom is much more than academic knowledge. Wisdom is the knowledge you get learning the truth about something combined with the knowledge you get through the experience of practicing those truths.
For example, think about driving a car. In your driver’s ed class, they gave you academic knowledge about driving. They taught you the truth that if you turn the wheel right, the car will go to the right. And the truth that pressing the brake will slow the car. And the truths about having the right-of-way.
But that academic knowledge itself doesn’t make you good at driving a car. You only get good at driving a car through the experience of practicing those truths while driving a car.
You know a truth: Press the brake to slow down. You only become good at braking by practicing that knowledge/truth over and over until you get good at judging when to brake and how hard to brake.
You practice the knowledge of braking until it becomes a habit. Part of your character. The more you practice, the more you learn about (the truth) of braking and the better you get.
That makes wisdom a self-reinforcing cycle. You know a truth. You practice that truth repeatedly until it becomes a habit ingrained in your character. The experience of practicing the truth repeatedly brings you a deeper knowledge—wisdom—that only comes through that experience. That newly learned wisdom becomes the baseline for your next cycle.
That is why wisdom only comes with experience.
It is why experience—whether its raising kids, coaching a team or starting a business—is so important for success.
It is why wisdom is the combination of your knowledge (of the truth) and your character (developed by the experience of repeatedly practicing that truth).
We can put it in an easy formula:
Wisdom = Knowledge + Character. KNOWLEDGE The knowledge component of wisdom is straightforward.
At work, do you know the truth—the facts—about your expertise? If you are in marketing, do you have professional marketing knowledge? If you are in surgeon, how is your surgical knowledge? If you are an auto mechanic, do you know how to fix cars?
If you are a supervisor, you need additional knowledge in leadership and management.
On the leadership side, you need to know how to communicate goals, context and meaning to your people. You need to know how to inspire, motivate and encourage your people. Do you make good decisions under pressure? If you are senior leadership, you need to know how to think strategically and lead a team of teams.
On the management side, you need to know how to optimize tasks, budgets, and resources to achieve goals.
At home with your family, you need the knowledge to be a good spouse and parent.
In the community, you need knowledge about how to be a good friend and citizen.
With knowledge of these things, you can practice them until they become habits and part of your character. Wisdom is the knowledge you get in that applied experience. CHARACTER Your character is who you are. It is the sum of your qualities, virtues, and vices.
Virtues are the good things in your character, like courage,
I am one of those people who sometimes learns things the hard way—by making mistakes. Many of the best leadership lessons I have learned came while I served as an AV-8B Harrier pilot in the Marine Corps.
Sometimes the leadership lessons came in installments. In this case, the first installment came from The Cow and the second from Buckwheat. The Cow I was a young Marine officer and new AV-8B Harrier pilot who had just reported to my first squadron in Yuma, Arizona, a few months prior.
In the Marine Corps, pilots don’t just fly. We all get ground jobs in the squadron running operations, logistics, intelligence, safety, maintenance, administration, etc.
As the newest and lowest-ranking pilot in my squadron, I was designated the Classified Material Control Officer, responsible for the security of all our secret and confidential documents. I had a small office, a couple of secure file cabinets, a logbook and even a part-time assistant.
While your flying skills are very important, your personnel evaluation—called a fitness report—is based mostly on how well you do your ground job. My first fitness report was due at the end of the month.
My boss was (callsign) Cow, aka The Cow, a tall, lanky, red-haired guy who was known for his intensity and being hard on people.
That’s the setup for my return from some vacation over Christmas.
Cow called me in his office and closed the door.
“How was your Christmas leave?”
“Good sir,” I said.
“You left the classified cabinets unlocked while you were gone,” Cow said.
My heart sank. I made a huge mistake in my first job and just before my fitness report. I was screwed.
Then Cow asked, “Do you know what you did wrong?”
“Yes sir.”
“Are you ever going to make that mistake again?”
“No sir.”
“Good. Your assistant found the unlocked drawers after you left. We inventoried everything and nothing is missing. I didn’t want to interfere with your Christmas. This won’t show up on your fitness report. Dismissed.” Buckwheat A year later I was going through my section lead check flight with my squadron commander—Buckwheat. A section lead qualifies you to lead a flight of two aircraft into combat.
Buckwheat was one of the best pilots in the Marine Corps. He was intense and extremely demanding. If the section lead check flight in most squadrons was like getting a high school diploma, then Buckwheat’s version was like defending your master’s degree thesis.
The plan was to fly a complex low-level strike from Yuma into the China Lake targets, land, debrief, and then fly back to Yuma.
The check flight into China Lake went well. I was confident I was going to get my section lead qualification. We refueled, took off and climbed to altitude. It was a gorgeous day flying down the Colorado River to Yuma on what should be an easy return flight. Except I knew that Buckwheat was going to screw with me.
Sure enough, after a while, Buckwheat was no longer on my wing. I contacted air traffic control and found him several miles behind.
Buckwheat signaled that his radios were out. As we approached Yuma, he signaled that he also had a hydraulic emergency. That meant Buckwheat had to do a vertical landing.
I called the Yuma Tower, declared an emergency and got Buckwheat cleared for a vertical landing. Crash crew rolled to the landing pad.
Just after I signaled Buckwheat that he was cleared for a vertical landing, I heard his voice on the radio.
“Check your fuel.”
The expletives that filled my cockpit would have made a Marine Corps drill instructor blush.
After all that work on the check flight, I had cleared Buckwheat for a vertical landing when he had too much fuel, too much weight, for a vertical landing. If he was an inexperienced wingman, he might have crashed.
After landing, I climbed out of the aircraft really angry at myself. I wanted to throw my helmet down the flight line. Buckwheat was going to take me apart in a long debrief and I was go...
In our last blog, we talked about how happiness and fulfillment come from good, high-quality relationships.
In this piece, we'll talk about the three basic ways to understand relationships, and find that covenant relationships give us the best chance for happiness and success. Three Types of Relationships Football, basketball and golf are all different paradigms for playing a sport. They all use the word “team”, but they mean different things by that word.
In football, there are offensive, defensive and special teams, each with 11 players. In basketball, there is one team of five on the court with players substituting in and out. Golf is generally an individual sport, but uses teams for international competitions.
The concept of team is different in each sport depending on the nature of the sport.
In the same way, in history there are three major paradigms for understanding life—a Wisdom Paradigm, Modern Paradigm and Postmodern Paradigm—and each has its own understanding of human relationships that differs based on the paradigm.
Each of these paradigms and their different understandings of relationship are present in our society today.
We’ll take a look at Modern contract relationships, Postmodern power relationships and Wisdom covenant relationships.
The more we know about each of these relationships types, the more we can engage the relationship that gives us the best chance for happiness and success—and avoid relationship types that are less effective. Contract Relationships In the 1500’s and 1600’s, Europe was devastated by religious wars that killed millions of people and bankrupted governments.
In response, Enlightenment thinkers of the time tried to come up with a new, modern way of understanding life that included a new understanding of human relationships.
They started with the idea that humans are radically free individuals in a state of nature—of constant war and anarchy—without basic, pre-existing relationships with others.
Individuals in this state of anarchy have lots of freedom to do whatever they want, but don’t have much security, because other people are free to do bad things to them.
The solution to this anarchy is that people come together in a social contract. They give up some of their freedom to the community or government and get security in return.
As the Modern Paradigm became a dominant way of understanding life, people began to think of all relationships as fundamentally contract relationships.
At their core, contract relationships are transactional and antagonistic.
Take the example of companies and employees.
In a contract relationship, employees want more money from the company for less work. Companies want more work from employees for less money. What is good for one is bad for the other.
Employees need jobs and companies need workers, so eventually they negotiate a contract. They establish a contractual relationship.
By definition, what’s good for the employee and good for the company are opposite. That means contract relationships are low-trust relationships.
Low-trust relationships driven by money get low levels of commitment from people. Low commitment results in low performance. That’s why contract relationships are low performance relationships.
Finally, low-trust, low-commitment relationships aren’t very stable. They are brittle. When you put them under pressure, they break.
In contractual relationships, you get the relationship you pay for.
Would you rather have friends who are with you because they love you or because you give them things?
Contract relationships are low-trust, low-performance, low-stability relationships. Power-based Relationships In the 1900’s, a new postmodern way of looking at life became increasingly influential in our society.
Postmodern thinking is grounded in the idea that many of the things we think are facts—like truth, morality and justice—are not facts,
Recent events have put Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the headlines. Companies, government and organizations are engaging CRT without any idea of where it comes from, what it believes or why it is profoundly dangerous.
CRT is one of many theories—including Critical Legal Theory, Intersectionality, de-constructionism, Gender Theory, etc.—that have their roots deep in postmodern thinking that started in the mid 1900's. Postmodern thinking has become increasingly dominant in academia—especially the humanities.
At its core, postmodern thinking says that there are no facts, no objective truth, and no objective morality. It explicitly rejects logic, and the idea that there is meaning or purpose in life.
Everything is subjective, a matter of perspective, opinion.
In this postmodern approach, it is not a fact that anorexia is unhealthy. It is a matter of opinion.
The postmodern rejection of facts means that saying, “Dishonesty, violence, and rape are wrong” is not a statement of fact, but simply a feeling, opinion, perspective.
If there is no objective truth, morality, or justice, then the only thing that matters is Power.
That’s why postmodern philosophies see everything in terms of perspectives and power.
All of the things that you were taught are facts—like it’s a fact that honesty is right and dishonesty is wrong—are nothing more than social constructs that the powerful programmed into you through the schools, media, culture, churches, etc.
The whole point of the postmodern theories like CRT is to de-construct the constructs you’ve been programmed with to understand how others use their power over you.
When everything is about perspective and power, words like racism develop opposite meanings.
Dr. Martin Luther King taught that it is a fact that racism is wrong because it is the unjust treatment of people of other races or ethnicities. Racism is about how you think about and treat people.
Postmodern professors teach racism in terms of power. If you have power, then you are racist. If you don’t have power, you can’t be racist.
In postmodern thinking, if you have privilege (power) because of your skin color, then your skin color makes you racist, no matter how you think about or treat people.
Older generations define racism based on the teachings of Dr. King. Younger generations are being taught the opposite, postmodern understanding: you are racist because of your skin color.
In CRT, believing in Dr. King’s teachings is an indication that you are racist.
Many of us have been taught that rather than fight, we should have respectful, rational-logical discussions with others to come to the truth and act on that truth.
Because postmodern thinking rejects logic and truth, rational discussion is absurd.
Instead, postmodern thinkers concocted the idea of narrative, a series of statements (not facts) arranged to emotionally manipulate you to submit to them.
Postmodern narrative is a way to exercise power over you through story. They can say whatever they want. They can make the narrative appear to be a logical discussion if that helps them manipulate you. They are free to change the narrative however they want—even to a contradictory story—if it controls you and gets them power.
If you argue that they are lying, you miss the point. There is no truth, so there are no lies.
You probably believe that it’s a fact that lying and racism are wrong. They’ll use that against you. By calling you a liar or racist, they can use the emotional weight you give those terms to manipulate you. There is nothing wrong with gaslighting or exploiting you. It’s just another exercise of power.
Postmodern thinking appears to be tolerant because it says you can think and do whatever you want.
In practice, postmodern leaders only tolerate what they want. When there is a disagreement with you, they will use power to force you to submit. There is nothing objectively wrong with forcing or even killi...
HAPPINESS AND RELATIONSHIP We’ve got an 80-year Harvard study that says happiness comes from good relationships. There’s a good reason for that.
As human beings, we are biologically wired for relationship. Relationship is a fundamental part of our human nature and DNA.
Having good relationships fulfills our human nature. That’s why good relationships bring happiness. That’s why we thrive when we are in good relationships. As the Harvard study shows, we are healthier, feel better, live longer and are more productive when we are in good relationships.
In contrast, lonely human beings are much more likely to be anxious, depressed, unhealthy and far less productive. Loneliness can shorten a person’s lifespan by 15 years—the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Want to make a prisoner suffer? Put him in solitary confinement and deprive him of relationship.
What is the worst way to bully someone? It’s not yelling at them or even hitting them. The worst way to bully someone is to shun them.
In ancient societies, exile was worse than death because exile cut you off from your relationship with your identity and your tribe.
If you give infants all the food and water they need but don’t give them love and affection, about 40% will die. More than half the surviving infants will have deep psychological challenges.
Why? Because love and affection help shape our neural pathways. When the affection doesn’t happen, the neural pathways don’t get wired correctly.
Our society feels like its breaking down, and anxiety, depression and suicide are skyrocketing because our relationships at every level of society are breaking down.
As humans, we are biologically wired for relationship, especially love.
That’s why good relationships bring fulfillment and happiness.
That’s why good relationships are so important for our personal, family and work success.
All you need for happiness is to focus on having good relationships. Developing good relationships will make you healthier, a better parent at home, a better leader at work, and a better friend to your friends and family.
Life is all about relationships. Everything else is a distraction.
Why doesn’t everyone already know this? WHY DON’T WE KNOW ABOUT THIS HAPPINESS THING? The more I talk with Millennials and GenZ, the more convinced I become that no one told them that life is about happiness. It’s not even on their radar screen. When I bring up happiness, things can get a bit awkward.
How would younger generations know about happiness if no one told them?
For thousands of years, people grew up surrounded by their parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, and cousins. Cousins were so close that they were often treated like brothers and sisters.
In late 1800’s and early 1900’s America, that was like the Buffalo neighborhood that my Grandma McGuire grew up in. She was born into an Irish-Catholic family around her 12 aunts and uncles, cousins and other Irish-Catholic families—all members of the local Irish-Catholic parish.
Between her parents, aunts and uncles, cousins and the Irish-Catholic families and parish, lessons about the meaning of life were constantly reinforced from every direction. If nothing else, you picked it up by osmosis and habit.
The same was true of many Italian, Jewish, Hispanic, Asian, Polynesian, etc. communities.
Many of those who rejected the religious aspects of those communities would later call themselves cultural Catholics, cultural Jews, etc.
As America grew larger and transportation got better, individual families increasingly left those close community ties, heading west by wagon train, railroads and eventually cars. The Depression and World War II accelerated that migration as people traveled looking for work or settled on the west coast after the war.
America shifted from a time when multi-generational families often lived together to a time in which the focus was on independent nuclear ...
HAPPINESS COMES FROM GOOD RELATIONSHIPS Harvard University has been conducting the Study on Adult Development for more than 80 years. It includes Harvard undergrads from the 1930’s and disadvantaged Boston youths from the early 1940’s—and their children. The purpose was to find out what makes happy and health lives.
The ongoing study has tracked the lives of thousands of people in over a hundred dimensions including their lifestyle, health, careers, psychology, relationships, and financial success.
The study confirms something you probably already know.
Dr. George Vaillant, who directed the study for more than 30 years, said that “The warmth of relationships throughout life has the greatest positive impact on ‘life satisfaction.’”
In short, Vaillant said, “Happiness is love. Full stop.”
Happiness doesn’t come from money, your education level or your social status.
Happiness comes from good, high-quality relationships.
The Harvard study shows that good relationships don’t just bring happiness. With good relationships, you’ll be healthier, feel better and live years longer.
It is simple. To achieve happiness in life, develop good, strong relationships.
Everything else is a distraction. WHAT IS HAPPINESS? What is happiness?
Happiness is a deep satisfaction with life. It is lasting, deep fulfillment. Happiness is the fulfillment of our human nature.
Back in the late 1980’s, I was a young Marine officer learning how to fly jets in south Texas.
A big part of our training was learning how to land on aircraft carriers. You have to fly a very precise, three-dimensional path at exactly the right angle to a small spot on the carrier deck.
If you do it right, the tailhook on your airplane grabs a cable on the deck and you go from 140mph to a full stop in about 2 seconds.
For a year, we practiced carrier landings on runways as part of every flight. Some flights were nothing but practice carrier landings. Every single landing was graded in detail. It was a grueling and often humbling process.
Finally, the day came to fly out to the aircraft carrier to get our carrier landing qualification.
You are alone in your airplane. From 20,000 feet, the aircraft carrier looks like a grain of rice on your kitchen floor.
The pressure is enormous. Your career depends on making the landings. That’s assuming you don’t make a mistake that gets you killed.
The first landing was a blur. You get through the pressure and land on the carrier deck because you’ve practiced it so many times. When you’re under pressure, you fall back on your training, on your habit patterns—an important lesson to remember.
After that first landing, there was an overwhelming feeling of fulfillment. After six landings, there was another overwhelming sense of fulfillment when they told me, over the radio, that I was carrier qualified.
Fulfilled because I fought through fear, stress and uncertainty to pass the test. All that practice and hard work changed me. It changed my relationship with myself.
Fulfilled because we—the students who qualified and the instructors who taught us—accomplished something difficult together. We bonded through that process.
You’ve probably had these moments in life in which we worked really hard for something, accomplished it, and felt fulfilled. It could be a lot of things like:
Getting a well-deserved promotion or professional certification Climbing a mountain Running a long-distance goal race Having kids that grow into good people. Achieving a goal weight Ending substance abuse Completing a big hobby or household project
The more difficult the challenge, the more you suffer to achieve it, the more fulfilling it is.
Easy wins aren’t as meaningful or fulfilling. Tough wins are.
Often, fulfillment comes from just spending time with people that you love. Late night college discussions. Walks on the beach. Having a meal together.
Life can be intense, fast-paced, and complicated.
Everywhere you turn, there’s pressure to be successful.
At work, we’re supposed to have cool jobs that pay well, and are socially relevant and fulfilling. We’re supposed to be ambitious, enthusiastic leaders moving quickly up the career ladder.
As parents, we are supposed to get our kids into the best schools, and ranked programs for sports or dance or music—or all three simultaneously. We’re supposed to be a good room-parent and coach while pursuing that successful career and finding kid-time. We are judged by the prestige of the colleges our kids attend, the scholarships they receive and the jobs they get after graduation.
In our community, we are supposed to fix injustice around the world, express the right opinions, live in the right neighborhoods, drive the right cars, and eat the chic foods at trending restaurants.
When we get exhausted chasing so many things, there is yet another list of things we’re supposed to do to de-stress like meditation, breathing exercises, cross-fit, “me-time”….
We are supposed to post all this on social media with smiling faces to broadcast our success and, I suspect, reassure ourselves that we are doing what we’re supposed to be doing.
No one asks if we want to do these things.
We are never told why we are supposed to do these things. There is just an implicit promise that if we achieve all these things something good will happen.
But no matter how many things we accomplish, that good thing never arrives.
If you feel overwhelmed, exhausted or burned out trying to keep up with it all, you’re not alone.
We have more education, wealth, and technology than ever in human history, and yet people feel more anxious and depressed than ever.
There is an alternative.
Let’s stop chasing endless lists of supposed-to-do’s and choose happiness.
It is that simple. Deep down, you already knew this.
Life is about happiness, fulfillment.
Science is clear about what makes us happy in life: good relationships. If you have good relationships, you will be happier, healthier and live longer.
So how do you get good relationships? Practice these Three Virtues:
Seek Wisdom because the more people trust your knowledge and character, the better your relationships.
Practice Love because the more people know that you care about them, the more committed your relationships.
Get Results because the more people know that—even under pressure—you can make the basket, close the deal, complete the project or properly arrange your daughter’s hair-bun before ballet class, the better your relationships.
There are three areas in life where you can practice these virtues. They include your relationships with:
Yourself Family and friends People at work and in the community
Your relationship with yourself is the foundation for all your other relationships. Be strong with yourself so you can be strong for others.
Good relationships with your family and friends ensure you will be there for each other during the greatest joys and toughest challenges of life.
At work, if you have good relationships with your people, they will be more engaged and productive. If you have good relationships with your clients, they will give your more work.
If you combine more work and more productivity, you will increase performance and have a big advantage whether you are a business, non-profit, public service or military. It may be counter-intuitive, but you’ll make more money focusing on good relationships than if you focus on making money itself).
Strong relationships in your community give you the best opportunity to work with others—even when you disagree—to make your community stronger, safer and more just.
Your life is really the story of how you pursue relationships with yourself, with family and friends, and at work and in your community. Your story interwoven with all of their stories.
Hopefully,
By Pete Bowen and Bailey Bowen
SON OF A SHARECROPPER In mid-February—just two months and a lifetime ago—my wife and I were in her hometown of Dothan, Alabama, for her high school reunion and to spend time with her father.
My father-in-law is the son of a sharecropper without much formal education. He grew up in one of the very poorest areas of the US, his bedroom the covered porch of a country house. He became a union pipe-fitter working at paper mills and nuclear power plants.
His wife had a good job working for the state. My in-laws owned their own home, had several businesses over the years, and even bought a brand-new Cadillac. In the 1970’s, that meant that you had accomplished something.
More important than any of that, they had a strong marriage and very good friends and they were happy.
My mother-in-law passed almost exactly 3 years ago. Hundreds came to her funeral not from obligation, but from love and respect.
My father-in-law misses her deeply, but he carries on, day-to-day, supported by and supportive of all those friends.
He’s a guy who will drive 10 hours to help you change a car tire—whether he’s met you or not. WAFFLE HOUSE: WISDOM AND CONTEMPT We visit Dothan a couple times a year and we always make it a point to have at least one meal at the Waffle House around the corner. It’s been a thing for 30 years.
So, in mid-February, we’re having a midnight breakfast at the Waffle House. We have the privilege of being served by Shea, a young woman who is working 3rd shift to cover for a co-worker. Shea always fills my coffee cup at exactly the right moment—often coming from across the room.
“How do you always know when I need coffee?” I ask.
“I can tell by the angle you hold the cup when you drink,” she tells me.
Maybe that’s something that all servers know. Maybe she figured out on her own. Either way, I respect her wisdom and am better for listening to it.
When many of my friends, comfortable in the economic top 10% of America, found out I eat at Waffle House, they looked at me like I’m crazy.
They wouldn’t be caught dead at a Waffle House. Ever.
Wrong kind of food. Wrong kind of people.
A few years ago, a friend group passed around an online quiz that analyzed you based on where you’ve eaten. Applebees and Chilis and similar restaurants were on the list. They mocked the restaurants and the “type of people” who eat at them. THE 9.9% AMERICAN ARISTOCRACY Many of us are firmly embedded, by our wealth and attitude, in what Matthew Stewart called the American Aristocracy in his essay The 9.9 Percent is the New American Aristocracy from The Atlantic.
Stewart differentiates the top .01% of ultra-rich Americans from the 9.9% of the rising American Aristocracy from the 90% of the rest of Americans. A major point of the essay is that the 90% have very little opportunity or hope of rising into the new, 9.9% aristocracy.
According to Stewart—and I think he has this right—the top 9.9% see themselves as “meritocratic winners” with attitudes of “its good to be us” and “we’re crushing the competition below.”
They have “mastered the old trick of consolidating their wealth and privilege, and passing it along to their kids.”
While I think Stewart gets some conclusions wrong, his data about and description of the 9.9% American Aristocracy are compelling. Stewart says that we, the American Aristocrats, have locked in, for ourselves, huge advantages in education, jobs, family stability, neighborhood and health.
We’re smarter. We’re richer. We have more prestigious jobs and a much lower divorce rate. We live in better neighborhoods and go to better schools. We’re better people because, well, look at what we’ve accomplished.
We spend our time talking only to the right people (that’s us) with the right attitudes about the right topics in the right restaurants. It becomes an echo chamber where we know that we are right because all the other educated people like us ...
By Pete Bowen and Bailey Bowen I learned a few important lessons last week that some might find helpful.
On March 17, government-ordered Covid-19 shutdowns reduced my consulting business income to $0 overnight.
The same week, two of my three daughters were laid off from their jobs.
At the time, we were told that the shutdown would be a couple weeks. It would be tough and painful, but we would get through it.
Though I had no income, we had enough savings to go 6 months on a bare-bones budget.
Besides, the government promised help for businesses like mine to get through it all.
I applied for unemployment and tried to apply for the PPP loans the government promised.
We weren’t too concerned. We felt comfortable that our savings could carry us past the crisis.
Then the shutdown kept getting extended. First to a month. Then 8-12 weeks.
At the same time, the government promises started falling flat.
As a sole-owner LLC, I had to wait until Friday, April 10, to apply for a PPP loan. I didn’t get access to an online application until Tuesday night, April 15th.
By then, however, the PPP money was already gone.
Unemployment? I got denied for several reasons including that I had “excessive earnings” of $145 one week when I took a 35-minute client phone call.
We are genuinely grateful for the $2,400 federal money we did receive. Here in Orange County, California, that’s about 10 days of living expenses for a family of four at the low-income level.
Then the shutdown kept getting longer. Three months, then six months and now maybe 12-18 months.
Last week, we realized that our savings are going to run out long before our political leaders tell us the economy will reopen.
Government ordered shutdowns took away all our income.
There is no PPP money for us. No EIDL money. No unemployment money. No business income for as long as a year.
We’re in trouble. We have to compete with 25 million other Americans to find jobs that generate a combined $50 an hour for us to make the low-income level.
My family is not alone in this.
A school-teacher/hairdresser friend of mine is already part of a rising black market economy. She’s a long-term substitute teacher who is only getting $800/month in unemployment because her UI base rate was too low as a substitute teacher.
How is she going to make her $2,000 rent on May 1? How is she going to buy food?
If you were in her situation, would you cut people’s hair in their homes despite the government guidelines?
A good friend owns an OC tourism business. It looks like they are approved for PPP money and they are grateful. It will help them get by through the end of June.
The problem is that Disneyland may not re-open until August or September.
There is no apparent mechanism by which they can last through August—much less September or October—which is how long it will take for them to get their business back up. If they go out of business, it will be very difficult for them to restart it.
The wife of another friend beat stage 4 cancer two years ago. With a compromised immune system, she is high risk for Covid-19. Nevertheless, she is working in a grocery store because their fear of Covid-19 is outweighed by their need for the income.
These are all educated, upper-middle class people running successful businesses until the government shutdowns ended their work.
All of us have been willing to make big personal and professional sacrifices to help address this terrible pandemic.
But when politicians blithely talk about shutdowns lasting 6 or 12 or 18 months, and government help lasts 2.5 months or doesn’t come at all, you are hit in the face with a new reality.
Our six months of savings went from more-than-covering-the-shutdown to it’s-going-to-fall-way-short.
How am I going to feed and house my family when our savings run out?
My friends whose companies received millions in PPP loans explain to me,
Welcome back to our series, Wisdom and Love vs. Postmodern Power. We’ve been talking about why we have so much conflict in our society and unhappiness in our lives.
In this session, we’ll discuss postmodern ideas about relationships, power, rules, freedom and how we develop the young.
Remember the three keys to understanding the Postmodern Paradigm:
There is no Truth or Morality or facts. Everything in life is In-the-Eye-of-the-Beholder. There is no purpose or meaning in Life. All that matters is Power. All relationships are power relationships.
Communities, Leaders and Power In postmodern thinking, since there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, the only thing that matters is power.
Some people have power.
Other people don’t have power.
Those with more power prevail over those with less power.
There are lots of ways to gain and use power.
Power can be something as obvious and crude as threatening or killing someone.
Power can be something as nuanced as using schools to program toddlers the way you want them to think.
Power gets exercised through the government, justice system, financial system, the education system, the media, churches, advertising, fashion and internet search results.
Power gets exercised by what questions are asked and not asked, and how those questions are structured to emphasize certain viewpoints and de-emphasize others.
The deepest power is in the hands of those who control the social construct programming.
Marriage and family may appear to be about love, but they are nothing more than a social construct that controls power in a relationship.
The husband has power over the wife. Parents have power over their children.
The Wisdom Paradigm says that all relationships are fundamentally covenant relationships where the good of the individual and team are the same.
The Modern Paradigm says all relationships are fundamentally contract relationships. What is good for the worker is bad for the company—and vice-versa.
In the Postmodern Paradigm, all relationships—no matter how they appear on the surface—are nothing more than power relationships.
Imagine that a person goes into a school and massacres 50 children.
In the Wisdom Paradigm, it is a fact that the massacre is evil.
In postmodern thinking, while people might really dislike the massacre, there is nothing objectively wrong with the massacre.
Society values security from massacres. The killer values killing people. One value isn’t factually better than the other. They’re just different values.
When the police capture the killer and the state puts him on trial, the state doesn’t do it because they are objectively right and the killer wrong.
The state does it because they are exercising power over the killer just as the killer exercised power over the children he murdered.
In the Postmodern Paradigm, the police may say that the massacre was “unjust” or “evil”, but that is just using the power of rhetoric to publish a narrative to program people to think their way.
If you are a cunning leader, you get control of the schools, the media, the churches and other influential aspects of life, and use them to program the social constructs of the rest of society.
If you can achieve that, then you don’t need to use much violence to keep control.
You keep the people under control by convincing them, perhaps through religious beliefs, education and media campaigns, that it is a fact that (insert desired belief or behavior) is “right” and it’s a fact that (insert undesired belief or behavior) is wrong.
As a postmodern leader, you understand that people really don’t want to know the nature of reality. They don’t want to know that there is no purpose or meaning. It is too terrible and depressing. They would rather live under the illusion that life has meaning and will embrace the leader that gives them that illusion.
The bottom line about relationships in the Postmodern...
Welcome back to our blog series Wisdom and Love vs. Postmodern Power. We’ve been talking about why we have so much conflict in our society and unhappiness in our lives.
The primary reason is that we have three conflicting understandings of life at work in society.
It’s like trying to play a game of basketball-football-golf. I call it basket-foot-golf.
The conflicting rules make it impossible to combine them into a single game. It will inevitably lead to conflict and deep frustration.
Are you supposed to move the ball forward by dribbling or running or using a club?
What is the proper club selection on 3rd down from the free throw line?
Do you win by scoring the most points or the fewest strokes?
Basket-foot-golf is a metaphor, of course, for the three understandings of life in conflict in our society—the Wisdom Paradigm, Modern Paradigm and Postmodern Paradigm. Review of the Wisdom Paradigm As we discussed in earlier blogs, the Wisdom Paradigm is the way all the world’s great religions and philosophies have thought about life for thousands of years.
The Wisdom Paradigm teaches that all people have the same human nature and purpose in life—Happiness.
A big, 80-year, ongoing Harvard study confirms something we already know. Happiness in life comes from high-quality relationships. Good relationships won’t just make you happier; you’ll also be healthier and live longer.
Knowing that our purpose in life is Happiness, reason tells us what we need to do to get there.
The Wisdom Paradigm says that all relationships are covenant relationships. In covenant relationships, the good of the individual and the good of the team are the same. Covenant relationships are high-trust, high-performance, high-stability relationships.
The Wisdom Paradigm teaches that there is an objective morality with moral facts.
For example, it is a fact that practicing moral virtues like courage, wisdom, honesty, justice and love help us develop good relationships that bring Happiness.
It is also a fact that practicing moral vices like addiction, cowardice and dishonesty destroy relationships and will inevitably lead to unhappiness. Rise and Fall of the Modern Paradigm In Europe in the 1500’s and 1600’s, however, things began to change. Religious wars were tearing Europe apart. Different Christian religions had conflicting versions of what Salvation—Happiness—was and different ways to get there.
The religious wars were brutal. Thinkers of the time responded by creating a whole new way of understanding life—the Modern Paradigm.
These new, modern thinkers needed to find a way to get people to live together without killing each other over religion. So, they split life into public life and private life.
Then they put our destination in life, Happiness, into the private side so that we stopped fighting about it publicly.
That helped with the religious fighting, but it created other problems.
When it came to morality, modern thinkers had to come up with a new way to justify objective morality with moral facts. They tried to do that using reason alone. As we’ll see again, that attempt created some big problems.
Modern thinkers also redefined human relationships from covenant relationships into contract relationships.
In contract relationships, what’s good for the individual and team are opposite.
That’s a big change.
For example, in the relationship between an employee and a company, the employee wants more money for less work, while the company wants more work while paying less money.
Contract relationships end up being low-trust, low-performance and unstable relationships.
Finally, remember that the Modern Paradigm is a whole new way of looking at life, so it impacted every aspect of society including art, literature, education, religion, work, music, government and politics—everything. The Rise of Postmodern Thinking During the late 1800’s and early 1900’s,
We’re in tough times right now.
Two of my three daughters were laid off last Friday.
After a well-worded inquiry, my oldest daughter avoided a lay off and transitioned to a new role in her company. Manager of the 3rd shift disinfecting team.
My mother is in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, and inaccessible in her board and care. The good news is that she doesn’t know what’s going on. The bad news is that I may have held her hand for the last time.
My 84-year-old father is in isolation in his apartment. I talk to him daily now—that’s a new thing—but only see him once a week to deliver his groceries.
My corporate clients are focused—rightfully so—on the critical issue of how to survive given the coronavirus. As a self-employed business leadership consultant, I’m not generating any income.
Tough times are, by definition, tough. They’re hard. It’s painful. It sucks while we’re in the middle of it.
In the long run, though, we’ll get through this.
We’re America. That’s what we do. We use tough times to become better as individuals and as a nation. I trust our nation. I trust our style of government.
Most of all, I trust the American people. I trust you.
We’ll use our strength, our grit, our determination and our ingenuity. We won’t just get through this crisis. We’ll get better from it.
When we’re under stress, we revert back to our habit patterns. That’s why our military trains so hard—to develop habit patterns. When the bullets are flying, we go back to our training—our habits.
That’s why character is so important. Character is really the accumulation of all your habit patterns.
These tough times are an opportunity to get better at life through better thinking and better habit patterns.
When things are good, we tend to coast through life without thinking much. That’s natural. When things are going well, why reflect much on things?
Tough times force us to stop. To think. Why are things bad? What’s not working?
Deeper, what is important in life that we need to prioritize? What isn’t that important that we can drop?
Tough times get us to reflect on the meaning of life, on where we’re headed and why.
Tough times are also an opportunity to strengthen our habit patterns to develop the character needed to tackle adversity and take advantage of opportunity.
When we combine good thinking and good habits, we develop wisdom. Wisdom is the knowledge about life that makes us Happier and more successful in life.
More specifically, wisdom is the combination of knowledge and character. When you know the truth—that’s the thinking part—and live the truth—that’s the habit and character part—you develop wisdom.
If you seek wisdom, when tough times hit again, you’ll know what needs to be done, and you’ll have the courage and discipline to get it done.
Tough times are an opportunity to develop the wisdom we need to be Happier and more successful in all aspects of life—at work and with our families.
So, what do we need to think about? What truth do we need to know about life?
We get so caught up in life that its easy to lose sight of what’s really important.
When I ask people what life is about, or ask about meaning or purpose in life, most people don’t know what to say. We don’t talk about it.
We spend all this time and energy and our lives doing things without knowing why.
Younger people have been told to chase a whole list of things in life—from competing for the right schools and sports teams to getting the perfect job and solving all the world’s problems—and then they often get burned and lose trust in the system. That’s unfair to them
What is life all about? How do we know what’s important and not?
It’s simple. Life is about Happiness. Fulfillment.
Where do we find Happiness? How can we get it?
According to an 80-year, ongoing Harvard Study on Adult Development, happiness comes from high quality relationships. You won’t just be happier.
Welcome back to our second session talking about the Modern Paradigm.
Let’s start with a review of what we learned in our first session on the Modern Paradigm.
For thousands of years, the Wisdom Paradigm was the dominant way of understanding life across all the world’s great societies, cultures and religions.
That was until about 450 years ago when Europe was torn apart by more than 100 years of religious wars that killed millions of people and devastated nations.
With Europe broken politically, spiritually and financially, European thinkers tried to come up with a new understanding of life that would allow people of different religions to live together without killing each other.
Modern, European philosophers began to replace the Wisdom Paradigm of understanding life based on purpose and reason with a Modern Paradigm of understanding life based on reason alone.
Reason is good at handling measurable, quantitative things and not very good at handling things that are tough to measure.
So modern thinkers split life into a public side of life for subjects that reason can tackle easily, and the private-personal side of life for subjects that reason has trouble with like religion, feelings and happiness.
Subjects like business, science, economics and ethics went into the public side of life. The idea was that society could use reason to discuss these issues publicly and get to the Truth about them.
In contrast, issues like Happiness, purpose, meaning, love and feelings went into the private-personal side of life. Putting them in the private side of life meant that they didn’t have to be talked about publicly. You could believe and talk about whatever you wanted in your private life.
The Wisdom Paradigm has covenant relationships—where the good of the individual and team are the same. Modern philosophers replaced those with Modern contract relationships where what’s good for the individual and team are opposite.
The Modern split of life into public and private sides made some important issues, like human nature, fulfillment and the meaning of life, much more complicated.
Modern thinkers invented disciplines, like psychology and psychiatry, to try to understand human nature using reason alone, but these disciplines can’t answer important questions about meaning or purpose in life.
When it comes to motivating people, Modern philosophers had to drop Wisdom concepts of Happiness and fulfillment—they were now on the private side of life. Instead, Modern thinkers tried to explain motivation in terms of quantifiable things like money.
Finally, when Modern philosophers dropped purpose, they lost the primary explanation for moral objectivity—for the existence of moral facts—like it’s a fact that slavery is wrong.
They tried to replace the justification for moral facts using pure reason alone, but that eventually failed. Morality and ethics went from being facts in the public side of life to being personal opinions on the private side of life.
That’s where we are so far in the Modern Paradigm. In this session we’re going to tackle how the Modern Paradigm looks at life, and the nature of Truth and knowledge, history, success and rules. Truth and Knowledge In the Wisdom Paradigm, the emphasis is on the development of, wait for it, wisdom.
Remember that wisdom is knowledge plus character. Wisdom is when you have knowledge of the Truth and the character to live the Truth. As you increase your knowledge and develop character more and more, you gain wisdom.
Wisdom is the knowledge and character you need to become a good person who develops good relationships and achieves Happiness in life.
The Book of Wisdom is Scripture because scripture contains the Truth and knowledge you need to live a good life and become a good person.
People gain wisdom through formation, a process that develops both intellectual knowledge and good character for Happiness.
The new,
Welcome back to our ongoing series about the history of the ongoing conflict in America—and how we fix it.
In our last three blogs, we discussed the basics of the Wisdom Paradigm—the dominant way of understanding life for thousands of years—for almost all cultures, religions and philosophies.
The Wisdom Paradigm teaches us that human nature has been the same through history, and that we all have the same destination in life, the same purpose, which is Happiness, fulfillment.
Happiness comes from having good relationships—with ourselves and with others.
If Happiness is our destination and purpose, then we use our reason to figure out how to get there.
Reason tells us that it’s a fact that if we practice virtues like honesty, justice, wisdom and love, we will become good people prepared for good relationships and Happiness.
Finally, the Wisdom Paradigm sees human relationships as fundamentally covenant relationships where the good of the team and the good of the individual are the same. The more you put into the team, the better you get. The more the team invests in you, the better the team gets.
Covenant relationships are the highest-trust, highest-performance and most stable relationships possible. In the deepest covenant relationships, people are willing to die for each other out of love.
The Wisdom Paradigm was the right track for the ongoing development of humanity—until we took a wrong turn and got off track several hundred years ago.
What happened? What got us off-track? Religious Wars in Europe In the 16th and 17th centuries, Europe was overcome by a series of religious wars that raged for hundreds of years.
These religious wars devastated large parts of France and Germany, and led to the deaths of millions of people. The wars took a terrible toll on Europe, impoverishing millions more and driving governments to bankruptcy.
In many areas, there was anarchy as rival armies marched back and forth, plundering everything. Civil wars broke out as people took advantage of religious differences and bankrupt rulers to take power themselves.
The suffering throughout Europe was enormous and long-lasting in a way that is hard for us to understand today. Think of the devastation of the civil war in Syria, but across Europe and for a hundred years.
People and nations became exhausted and impatient by the suffering that seemed to be unending and systemic.
Thinkers began to search for a new way to understand life—a new paradigm—that could get them out of the terrible religious and political conflicts.
They needed to find a way for people of different religions to live together without killing each other. This led to the is the rise of political philosophers like Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau that you may remember from your political sci class in college. The Modern Paradigm--Reason Alone The Wisdom Paradigm is based on a foundation of purpose and reason. As we said in earlier blogs, our purpose, Happiness, is our destination in life and reason tells us how to get there.
Ever since Europe had become Christian, faith had taken the role of purpose. So, for European Christian civilizations, the equation was essentially faith/purpose and reason. Faith provided the purpose, the destination (salvation), and reason helped people understand what was needed to achieve salvation.
The horrific wars in Europe were over religion, over faith, over what people understood to be their purpose or destination in life.
So, for many European philosophers, the answer to ending the vast suffering was obvious. Let’s drop that thing, faith, over which we’re killing each other, and reconstruct our entire understanding of life in terms of reason by itself.
They do that by splitting life into public and private.
Instead of the Wisdom Paradigm’s understanding of life as a unified whole focused on Happiness, the Modern Paradigm splits life into your public life and your private, or personal life.
Wisdom Paradigm Part 3 Welcome back to our third and last session talking about the Wisdom Paradigm. The better you know the Wisdom Paradigm, the more successful you can be in all aspects of your life—at work, at home and with your family.
For thousands of years, the Wisdom Paradigm had us on the right track developing towards goodness and Happiness—until we took a wrong turn a few centuries ago into the Modern Paradigm. We’ll talk about that wrong turn, what happened and the Modern Paradigm in our next podcast.
Here’s a little review of the Wisdom Paradigm so far.
The Wisdom Paradigm teaches us that times and cultures and technology change, but human nature doesn’t change. Human nature has been the same throughout history and will remain the same in the future. Our DNA is what makes us a homo sapiens. Our human nature is what makes us human.
We all have the same purpose, the same destination in life—Happiness. Happiness comes from good relationships.
If you want to be happy in life, become a good person who develops good relationships.
There is an objective morality with moral facts—like it’s a fact that the Holocaust and slavery are wrong. It’s also a fact that if you practice virtues like honesty, justice, wisdom and love, you’ll become a good person with good relationships who achieves Happiness.
All human beings are social beings who thrive in relationships. We are at our best in Wisdom covenant relationships where the good of the individual and the good of the team are the same. The more you put into the team, the more you grow your skills, character, teamwork and leadership. The more the team invests in its people, the better the team gets.
Covenant relationships are the highest trust, highest stability and highest performance relationships.
Wisdom is knowledge plus character. The more you know about the Truth and the better you live that Truth—your character—the more wisdom you will develop in life. Wisdom is really knowledge about life itself.
So, life itself is pretty straightforward. Become a good person who has good relationships and you’ll be happy in life. It’s that simple.
Why are we so burned out in our society today? Why are we unhappy and anxious? Why have the depression and suicide rates skyrocketed—especially for young people?
Because we lost our focus on good relationships and Happiness, and got distracted chasing things like money, fame, social media, status, technology, immortality and technology.
Anything that distracts us from the fundamental Truth of good relationships is going to eventually lead to unhappiness, anxiety, depression and other bad outcomes.
With these lessons in mind, let’s jump into our last blog learning the basics of the Wisdom Paradigm. WORK Fisher, smith, shoemaker, miller, weaver, mason, carpenter… What are these?
In the Wisdom Paradigm, and in earlier times, if your name was Smith, you were probably the blacksmith in town. If your name was Weaver, it was probably because your family wove fabric. Miller was the man who milled the grain into flour. You can probably figure out Fisher, Shoemaker, Mason and Carpenter on your own.
Smith was not a job, not something that you did just for money. It was more of a vocation, a calling, a fundamental part of who you were. Smith was a fundamental part of your identity. As the smith, your work represented you personally. Your work was your reputation, your identity, who you were.
As the weaver, the quality and finish of your fabric reflected you directly. Your work contained, expressed and embodied you. Your work was you and you were your work.
In contrast, today, work is a job. A job is about earning money, making a living, so you can eventually retire and do the things you find fulfilling. We don’t think of work and fulfillment as going hand in hand. We’re often told that we’re not supposed to find our work fulfilling.
Today we divide everything into our professional-work life a...
Wisdom and Relationships In our last blog, we talked about the basics of the Wisdom Paradigm. The better you understand the Wisdom Paradigm, the happier and more successful you’re going to be in life.
Let’s review some of the anchor points from our last session.
In the Wisdom Paradigm, culture and times may change, but human nature has remained the same throughout history.
Life is about pursuing Happiness—the fulfillment of our human nature. What brings us Happiness in life? The answer: Good relationships.
If our destination or purpose in life is Happiness, then we use our reason to figure out how to get there. Reason tells us that it’s a fact that practicing virtues like honesty, justice, courage and love, will make us good people ready for good relationships and Happiness.
This combination of purpose and reason—purpose tells us our destination, Happiness, and reason tells us how to get there—is the critical foundation for everything in the Wisdom Paradigm.
Finally, your life is your story of how you use your gifts and talents to pursue Happiness.
In this session, we’ll talk about more anchor points in the Wisdom Paradigm—especially relationships, truth and morality. Here’s a summary.
The Wisdom Paradigm teaches that all people are basically social beings. That’s why we find Happiness and fulfillment in relationships.
The purpose of every community—of every organized group of people—is to become good. Communities pursuing goodness help the people in the community become good. That puts everyone on the path for good relationships and Happiness.
We’re going to use the word “team” for all types of communities or groups of people ranging from families and neighborhood groups to businesses and political communities.
In the Wisdom Paradigm, the good of the individual and the good of the team are the same. We call this a covenant relationship. The more you put into the team, the better you get. The more the team invests in you, the better the team gets.
Covenant relationships are high-trust, high-stability and high-performance relationships.
In the Wisdom Paradigm, it’s a fact that practicing virtues like honesty, justice and love make us good people, ready for good relationships and Happiness. That means there is an objective morality with moral facts. Morality is not just a matter of personal opinion.
The Wisdom Paradigm also teaches that there is objective Truth. The pursuit and discovery of the Truth about life is a fundamental part of our pursuit of Happiness.
In the Wisdom Paradigm we don’t just pursue knowledge, we pursue wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge of the Truth combined with the character to live that Truth.
When you know and practice the Truth over and over in life, you develop wisdom. This process of developing wisdom is called formation.
What is the proper motivation in life? Not money or social status, but the pursuit of Happiness.
That means that we don’t measure success in life by our bank account or social media followers. Success in life is measured by the goodness, honor and Happiness we achieve through the good relationships we have.
Let’s dive in. Humans are Social Beings The Wisdom Paradigm teaches that human beings are fundamentally social beings.
Being human means relationship is a fundamental part of our human experience.
From the very beginning, we are born into a family relationship. Children who have good, healthy relationships with their parents have the best chance of turning out well in life.
Relationship is a critical part of our lives. Think about the importance of relationships in grammar school and high school.
We want to share our good times with friends. We need the support of friends when times are difficult.
Sharing experiences with friends is deeply fulfilling. Being bullied is devastating.
You become who you hang around.
Our deepest joys include friendship, marriage and family.
With all the wealth and education and technology that we have today, why does life feel disorienting and confusing?
Why are supposedly smart people saying and doing things that are absurd and contradictory?
Why do we feel like basic morality has collapsed and we’re headed the wrong direction?
Welcome back for the third blog in a series that tells the story of how we got into this mess and how we can get out of it.
As we discussed in earlier blogs, the confusion and disorientation we are feeling are big-time indicators that we are in the wrong place headed the wrong direction.
The collapse of morality? Important people saying absurd things? A dramatic increase in depression and suicide? More obvious signs that we’re in the wrong place headed the wrong way.
We drifted off-course somewhere, and life and society have slowly broken down ever since.
We’re looking at life the wrong way. We’re disoriented. We need to find our anchor points and get back on course.
Let’s find the best way to understand life—let’s find the Truth about life—so we can pursue Happiness and thrive.
So, what was our original course? What was the original paradigm—the original way of understanding life—that we drifted from?
The Wisdom Paradigm.
The more you know the Wisdom Paradigm, the better you will understand life, and the happier and more successful you will be.
The Wisdom Paradigm is the basic way that people have understood life for thousands of years. It is common to all the world’s great philosophies and religions.
Here are the basics of the Wisdom Paradigm:
We all have the same human nature. Times change, technology changes, but human nature has stayed the same through cultures and history We all have the same purpose in life: Happiness. Happiness is the fulfillment of our human nature, it’s our purpose, our destination in life. Happiness comes from having good relationships. Our lives are our unique stories of pursuing Happiness. Happiness is our destination in life. Reason tells us how to get there. Our relationships can only be as good as we are, so become a good person with good character. Practice virtues like love, courage and wisdom until they become who you are.
The Wisdom Paradigm The Wisdom Paradigm has been around for thousands of years. At its core, the Wisdom Paradigm is based on the idea that we all have the same human nature and therefore the same purpose in life—Happiness.
Happiness simply is the fulfillment of our human nature.
Looking back in history, no matter what culture or time period, we can see that human nature doesn’t change.
That’s why we all understand things like love, fear, courage, and joy largely the same way no matter our culture, ethnicity or time. The fact that we have the same human nature, the same concerns about life and death, and family, is what unites us as one humanity across cultures and time.
While our DNA is what makes us homo sapiens, it is our shared human nature that makes us all human.
We can read Shakespeare today because, 400 years after his death, what he said about love, betrayal, humor and ambition remains wise and relevant to us.
King David wrote the Psalms 3,000 years ago as a reflection on the challenges, achievements and joys of his life. We read them today because we find their wisdom and guidance valuable even though we live in a completely different culture and time.
Confucius wrote The Analects 2,500 years ago in a distant culture and time. We read them because they contain valuable insights into human nature and life that apply today.
Even when we go back 4,000 years to the most ancient written story we have—the Epic of Gilgamesh—we can relate to Gilgamesh’s experience of brotherhood, love, meaning in life, and mortality. Why can we do that? Because Gilgamesh shares the same human nature with us. Because human nature is timeless.
In the Wisdom Paradigm, times change and cultures change,
Basket-Foot-Golf: How Paradigms Work In our last session, I teased you with some imagery.
Imagine walking on an athletic field and seeing a group of people trying to dribble footballs through a sand trap. Take second to really visualize that.
To our left, there is a coach talking about the proper golf club selections for the free throw line and goal line.
To our right, we see a person wearing shoulder pads put a big orange ball on top of a small white tee, and try to hit it with a 5 iron.
Behind us a person practices kicking a small dimpled white ball from behind the three-point line painted on a strip of grass.
One coach is teaching a seminar on how to score the most strokes. Another is teaching a seminar on how to score the fewest baskets. Which one is right?
As the participants go through this, they seem confused. Disoriented. Their activity doesn’t seem to have any particular purpose. It is just what they are doing.
What the heck is going on?
When we came upon this scene, most of us quickly recognized the orange ball as a basketball, the white ball as a golf ball, and the brown oblong ball with stitching as a football. The clubs people are using are golf clubs. The tees are golf tees and football kicking tees.
Of course the participants are confused and disoriented. They’re trying to play three unrelated sports simultaneously. They are confusing football, basketball and golf. Watching this, we know quickly that whatever they are trying to do, it will never work.
These three sports are all ways to understand and play a game, but they are very different.
Each sport is a self-contained system independent of the other sports.
Each sport uses the same words like rules, ball, team, playing surface, scoring and win, but the way each sport understands these words is very different. Sometimes the way each sport understands these terms is opposite.
Essentially, each sport is a different paradigm for athletic competition.
What’s a paradigm? A paradigm is defined as “A set of assumptions, concepts, values and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them.”
That’s the technical definition of paradigm. A much easier way of thinking about paradigms is the example we’re talking about. Football, basketball and golf are all different paradigms—different ways of understanding—how to play a game.
In football, you use a large oval ball, run plays and hit people hard. There are 22 positions with 11 on offense and 11 on defense. You move the ball forward by running with it or passing it. You can make one downfield pass per play. You score by running or passing the ball beyond the goal line, or by kicking the ball through goal posts at the end of the field. You win by scoring more points than your opponent.
In basketball, you use a large round ball and get kicked out of the game for hitting people. You move the ball forward by dribbling it or passing it. You are not allowed to run with it. You pass the ball repeatedly during play. The same five people play on offense as defense. Like football, basketball games have time limits. Unlike football, play is continuous through offense and defense. You score by tossing a ball through a hoop at the end of the court. Like football, you win by scoring more points than the other team.
In golf, you use a small, dimpled ball and move that ball forward by hitting it with a club. You never touch other players and time is not generally kept. While passing the ball is fundamental to the game of football and basketball, throwing a golf ball down the fairway will get you disqualified. You can play as part of a team, but you usually play as an individual. While football and basketball go back and forth on the same playing area, golf is played on 18 different areas. You don’t win by scoring the most points, but by scoring the fewest strokes.
Three very different paradigms for playing a game.
Clearly,
Lost on a Low Level Flight Back in the last century, when I was in flight school in the Marine Corps, I was stationed for a time in the vacation destination of Kingsville, Texas. At one point, Mother Nature decided to send a massive hurricane our way.
With the hurricane inbound, a young instructor and I—he was 25 years old and I was 23—were told to take one of the jets and go away and get some training done. The instructor decided we were going to practice low-level flights to Houston and Meridian, Mississippi, on our way to Atlanta where his girlfriend lived.
And so, with the hurricane imminent, we took off from Naval Air Station Kingsville as my newlywed wife drove north, by herself, to Dallas to escape.
The low-level flight to Houston was good. We got gas and launched out of Houston.
Now remember, this was last century, way back in the days before GPS and digital cockpit displays. Low-level navigation flights were designed to teach you how to navigate using a paper map, a compass, and a stopwatch. You flew high-altitude to the start point, dropped down to 500’, accelerated to 420 knots, hit the stopwatch and used the compass to fly the heading to the next checkpoint.
You navigated by flying the correct direction for a certain amount of time where you would, hopefully, find your checkpoint. When you got to the checkpoint you turned the airplane to a new heading and flew that direction for a certain amount of time.
How did you know where you were? By flying the right direction for the right amount of time and looking out the window for terrain features—maybe a road or powerline or river or bridge—that matched your paper map.
Louisiana is flat, so there’s not many hills or mountains to help you stay on route. There are a lot of towns and roads and they all look the same.
We were about 10 seconds late hitting our first checkpoint—a river.
Crossing our second checkpoint—a highway—we were about 25 seconds late. The terrain wasn’t matching what was on the map very well. At one point, I saw a long line of numbered, colored boards go under the airplane. They looked somewhat familiar, but they passed so fast that I couldn’t tell what they were.
Flying the rest of the route was much the same. We were pretty sure we were lost. We got to the end-time for the route and were getting low on gas, so we started our climb to 15,000 feet and called air traffic control to get vectors to Meridian. It took air traffic control some time to find us. We were not where they expected we would be. We had been way off course.
After we landed at Meridian, the tower called us while we taxied and told us to give the Army base, Fort Polk in Louisiana, a phone call.
Fort Polk was quite unhappy because we had flown our orange and white airplane, 500’ high, right through the middle of their tank gunnery range.
While they had tanks lined up and firing.
Those colored, numbered boards? That was the tank range. Fortunately, tank rounds have a flat trajectory and went under us.
We figured out that the compass in our airplane was about 8 degrees off. That caused us to fly a bit north of our intended route. The deviation was small at the beginning but got bigger and bigger the further and longer we flew—until we were way off course.
It almost got us killed. We didn’t know where we were until we climbed to altitude. Air traffic control found us and gave us the reference points we needed to get to Meridian.
There are about 100 good lessons from that flight. Let’s talk about a few. Lessons From Being Lost Small Deviations Can Kill You First, a minor course deviation is insidious over time. It can kill you.
If you start off headed completely the wrong direction, you can realize it quickly. The deviations are big and noticeable. If our compass had been 90 degrees off, we would have figured it out quickly.
When you’re only a little off course though, things are only a little bit off.
Airplane Crashes and Reference Points Almost exactly 20 years ago, on July 16, 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife Carolyn died in an airplane crash off the coast of Massachusetts. The famous son of President John F Kennedy was headed to Martha’s Vineyard for a wedding.
A safety investigation determined that Kennedy flew into hazy weather at night and experienced spatial disorientation, causing him to lose control of the airplane and crash into the ocean.
More simply stated, Kennedy flew into haze at night in which there was no horizon. In those conditions, without any reference points, even the best pilots will lose their sense of what is up and what is down. The airplane will eventually enter an unintended dive or turn that will result in a crash. Looking outside, with no reference points, any moves by the pilot to save the airplane usually end up making the situation worse.
The same thing happened to an experienced helicopter pilot over New York City last month.
The solution is to look inside the airplane and fly using the reference points provided by your instruments. The instruments will tell you how your airplane is pointed in relation to the horizon.
In flight school we used to practice these situations in simulators. After closing your eyes, the instructor puts your simulated airplane in a very awkward position, then tells you to open your eyes and get out of it.
The procedures are simple. Look at your flight instruments and figure out the key reference points: where is the horizon, where is up and where is down. Then roll your wings to parallel the horizon and pull up.
When you have good reference points, you know where you are and how to get where you’re going. When you don’t have good reference points, you get increasingly confused and the situation gets progressively worse.
With good reference points you live. Without reference points you die.
Losing reference points can be scary. Most of us have experienced it.
Ever suddenly realize that you were lost driving or hiking, with no idea of where you are?
Ever wake up after an intense dream and not know where you are?
Most people feel very unsafe and anxious until they regain some reference points and understand where they are.
The same is true of life.
It is easy to get caught up in the vortex of life chasing what everyone else is chasing because, well, everyone is chasing those things. Money. Social status. Elite colleges. High club sport rankings. The right car. The right neighborhood. Eating the right foods at the right restaurants while drinking the right wines on the cool vacations for everyone else to admire all posted on InstaFaceGramBook.
We chase those things under increasing social pressure while suffering increasing burnout until we crash. Check out the previous blog on millennial burnout.
We get caught up in the frenzy—the haze—of chasing life and find ourselves without any reference points. Without those reference points, we lose our sense of direction, and what’s up and what’s down.
We are watching people crash and die every day. There is a suicide in the United States every 12 minutes. Anxiety and depression have skyrocketed. Suicide has become the second leading cause of death for 10 year-olds.
What is the solution?
We’ve got to get back to our reference points.
We need to get our lives re-oriented in the right direction.
Through practice, we need to turn those reference points into anchor points for our lives. With solid anchor points, we can remain safe in a strong position no matter how crazy life around us gets.
We need to raise our children so that they have the best anchor points possible as early as possible in their lives.
When you have good anchor points in life, you understand where you are, where you are going and how to get there.
When times get tough and life is in chaos, you can stop, go back to your anchor points, get settled, and move forward again.
In our last blog, we talked about three simple things you can do to build a great organizational culture.
The three steps were to:
Identify your core values Develop an ethos to practice your core values to create your culture Continually improve your core values, ethos and culture
The point is that if you take each of your core values and transform them into 2-3 specific behaviors that practice that core value, you can intentionally create your organizational culture. You can align and synergize your culture so you get the best performance from your team.
It’s simple. You become what you do, what you practice. If you practice 2-3 behaviors for each core value, your core values will become your culture.
That sounds good, but what core values should you choose? What are the right core values?
One organization I work with has nine core values and 30 corresponding statements.
Another I know has six core values, but very few employees know them, much less intentionally use them.
Are core values supposed to guide team behavior or function as little more than a public relations statement? Few companies transform the values into specific practices. Even fewer measure whether their values are being practiced or not.
So, what are the answers?
Let’s start by understanding the broader context around core values.
We know from earlier blogs that the key to success at work is having high-trust relationships with your team and with your clients. High-trust relationships with your team increases employee engagement and productivity. High-trust relationships with your customers brings more business.
That means that you want to choose core values that build the highest-trust relationships with your team and customers.
It gets better. Remember, you achieve Happiness in your personal life and success in your work life the same way: by developing high-quality, high-trust relationships with others. The same values that will bring you success in your personal life will bring you success in your work life.
If you do it right, you’ll choose a single set of core values that cover success in all aspects of your life.
If you choose a lot of core values, you get the advantage of a long, inclusive list of values. No values get left out.
On the other hand, if you have too many core values, then the values lose strength because there are too many to learn and practice.
Your average person is max’ed out at three core values. Three is the most people can understand and actively apply. To be most effective, limit yourself to three core values.
How do you balance a desire for a long list of values with a limit of three?
The answer is this: Choose three core values that can be easily unpacked into all the other values in your company and in life.
Putting all of this together, you want three core values that build high-trust relationships in your work and personal lives, and can be unpacked into all the other important values.
That brings us to the three core values that are critical for developing great relationships: Wisdom, Performance and Love. The Best 3 Core Values Wisdom: Knowledge + Character So, what is Wisdom? Wisdom is the combination of knowledge and character. That means that wisdom unpacks into knowledge and character.
More specifically, wisdom is your knowledge of the Truth combined with your ability to live the Truth. It can be as simple as having the knowledge that cigarette smoking is bad for your health combined with the strength of character to avoid smoking.
The more knowledge you develop about the Truth and the more you develop your character practicing that knowledge, the more wisdom you gain. It’s a continuously improving cycle. That’s why wisdom comes through experience.
The more people trust your knowledge about something, the more they will follow you and the better your relationships. The more people trust your character—especially in difficult situatio...
It doesn’t matter what kind of team you are leading, your organizational or team culture is really important for success. If you have a strong team culture, you will get more employee engagement and productivity, and higher performance.
Studies show that companies with strong cultures have improved performance including:
65% increase in share price 4x increase in revenue growth 15% increase in productivity 30% greater client satisfaction 100% increase in unsolicited employee applications
Only 14% of companies have strong cultures. 48% of companies have weak cultures. Building a strong culture can give you a strong competitive advantage.
If talking about team culture makes you feel a little uncomfortable because culture is too “touchy-feely”, you’re not alone. Many leaders are more comfortable discussing financials or strategy. Culture can seem undefined and difficult. Many leaders avoid it for those reasons.
That said, your team culture is critical to your success. When your team culture is strong, you thrive. When your culture is bad or toxic, it can destroy your team.
Is your team culture strong, mediocre or weak? How do you know?
Do you have a step-by-step plan that optimizes your culture and success, or are you just driving blind, settling for whatever culture happens?
If you don’t have a specific plan to maximize your team culture, you’re missing an opportunity to increase your performance and gain a competitive advantage.
Let’s use a three-step approach to help you develop a plan that systematically builds a strong team culture.
The approach we’re going to discuss works with any team—your work team, family team, sports team, church team—any team. This works if you are the owner or CEO of a company or a new manager with three direct reports.
Practicing this approach won’t just help you lead a better team; it will help you become a better leader in every area of your life.
Let’s start with the goal in mind: a high-performance team that drives success.
We know from earlier blogs that the key to success in leadership and life is developing high-trust relationships.
In business, success comes from high-trust relationships with your customers and your team.
If you have high-trust relationships with your customers, they will bring you more business.
If you have high-trust relationships with your team, you will get higher employee engagement, more productivity and higher performance.
The combination of great relationships with your customers and your team gives you a big competitive advantage.
With that in mind, our approach develops a team culture that builds high-trust relationships with your team and customers.
We’ll start by getting a better idea of what team culture is, then go into the Three Steps for building a Great Team Culture:
Core Values Ethos Continuous Improvement
Team Culture Your team culture is how your people work together to get things done. It’s your team’s personality. Your team’s character.
Teams with good cultures have people in high-trust relationships who work well together. They are aligned to the same team goals. They take advantage of their diverse talents to achieve high-performance results. Continuous improvement is built into how they work. They challenge each other to excellence as a team and as individual people. They care about each other.
You need a step-by-step plan to systematically form and maintain a strong team culture.
For most companies, there’s no plan. Team culture is just whatever happens—for better or worse. Step One: Core Values Most of us think that there’s only one kind of core value: the set of values posted on the company walls. These are the explicit core values. Explicit, because they are the official, published core values.
Most companies have four or more official core values. Probably less than 10% of the employees can recite them.
Life moves quickly. Work. School. Kids. Travel ball teams. Friends. Social media. Keeping up with pop culture and the latest Netflix series.
You’ve got to have the right job that combines social consciousness and financial reward.
All while saving the environment and being politically conscious and staying in great shape and finding time for yoga or meditation so you’re not too anxious or stressed or depressed.
And don’t forget to post the latest vacation on Instagram to show everyone else your life is great and you’re keeping up with social expectations.
It’s exhausting. It can drive you to burnout.
The thing is, most of these are just a blur of relatively unimportant distractions in life.
How do you exit this crazy, out-of-control carnival ride?
The answer is to simplify and focus on the fundamentals.
The fundamental is relationship. Love.
That’s it for everything in life.
How does that work?
The meaning of life—your purpose in life—is Happiness.
Happiness doesn’t come from money or social status or education or having your kids at an elite college. Happiness comes from high-quality relationships. Period.
Whether it’s your family or work or friends, high-quality relationships are the highest performing relationships because they are based in deep trust and love.
The secret to winning in business? Focus on relationships instead of profits.
Develop good, high-trust relationships with your customers and they will bring you their business. Develop good, high-trust relationships with your team and you will maximize their engagement and productivity. The combination of good customer relationships and good team relationships will maximize your performance—your profits—which you can then use to benefit your team. Great relationships drive profits better than a focus on profits.
It’s all about relationship.
The secret to a great family? Relationships. A great relationship with your spouse is the best way for your kids to learn that good relationships are the key to success and Happiness in life.
Teach your children that to have great relationships with others, they must first be in a good relationship with themselves.
Childhood and adolescence are the story of your kids discovering, loving and leading themselves so they can be strong in their future relationships with family, work and friends.
Our society is totally dependent on good, high-trust relationships between each other and with our justice, financial, political, health, education, etc. systems. When the trust breaks down in those relationships, society unravels. The word society itself comes from the Latin socius which means companion.
It’s all about relationship.
Picking up on the pattern here? Personal success, family success, friendship success, work success and Happiness in life are all tied to one thing: relationship.
We’re surrounded by examples of the importance of relationship.
More than half of the hit songs are love songs. Relationship.
How do you feel when you are with someone you love? Relationship.
How do you feel when you lose someone you love? Relationship.
Why do people suffer so much in solitary confinement in prison? Because you deprive them of relationship.
What’s the worst way to bully someone? It’s not yelling at them. It’s shunning them. Depriving them of relationship.
In ancient societies, exile was worse than death because you deprived the person of relationship with their clan and their own identity.
If you give infants all the food and water they need but deprive them of love and affection, four out of ten will die. Love and affection are more important for survival than food and water.
More than half the surviving infants will have deep psychological challenges. Why? Because love and affection help form our neurological pathways. When the affection doesn’t happen, the neural pathways get mis-wired.
It’s all about relationship. As humans,
Not long ago, a group of friends of mine were having an email discussion about a problem facing our nation at the time.
They’re all good, well-intentioned and successful people. We all agreed that a certain behavior was deeply wrong, but we had deep disagreements about the nature of the problem and the best solution to fix that problem.
The email exchange got spirited. At one point, one of the participants said that if you didn’t understand the injustice his way and you didn’t agree with his solution, you were guilty of participating in the injustice yourself.
Take a second to think about that. If you don’t agree with me, you’re guilty of the evil behavior yourself.
I brought this up in a discussion with some millennials and iGens I know, and they nodded their heads knowingly.
“It gets worse than that,” they said. “Not only are you evil if you don’t see things my way, but if you aren’t taking action on all the problems in the world right now, you’re a bad person.”
You’re not a good person because you stopped using plastic straws. You can only be a good person if you don’t use straws and eat the right foods from the right farms and boycott products from certain companies and countries and solve homelessness in your town and post social media support for certain movements in certain overseas nations and oppose this policy and care about that species and, and, and…. (insert a list of at least a hundred other things).
In earlier times, society used college and the media to help people understand Beauty and Truth and Morality so that people could practice and seek those things in life. Learning about Beauty and Truth and Morality made us aware of the injustices and problems in life, and we worked together to fix them.
It was a positive view of life that brought hope, built relationships and Happiness, and solved problems.
That positive understanding of life has worked pretty well. We forget that the problems humanity faced for thousands of years—deep hunger and poverty, rampant disease, early death—were much worse in the past than today. We forget the enormous progress we’ve made in very challenging times.
Today, we have more wealth, education and technology than any time in human history. We live better and longer. We’ve made enormous progress addressing hunger, disease and shelter.
Yet, through the postmodern thinking that dominates colleges and the media today, we’ve taught our younger generations to see the world and life only in terms of radical injustice and power.
We’ve taught them that there is very little good going on in our society. Life is dominated by injustice and evil. You are either a victim suffering injustice or an oppressor imposing injustice.
There is no meaning or purpose. Love is a lie. Society is irredeemable. Life is hopeless and dystopian.
If you’re not buying and boycotting all the right things… If you’re not working at a job that actively solves injustices… If you’re not attending all of the protests about all the important issues (by the way, they’re all important)… If you’re not spending all your time on the Internet railing against injustice and attacking bad people…
Then you don’t care and you are a really bad person.
As one millennial put it: “We’ve been told that the world is full of injustice and that we are supposed to solve all of it. We’re supposed to care about every issue we’re told about. If we don’t take action, that means we don’t care and we’re a bad person. But there are so many injustices and we can’t solve them all and its overwhelming and exhausting.”
We have used college and the media to overwhelm millennials and iGens with injustice, then we psychologically bully them, bending them to our will, our issues and our solutions.
Some in older generations may be ok with that. They think it’s just the price of their version of justice.
But it’s killing those in younger generations.
If you are like many people, when you saw the title Why Faith is Critical to Your Business Success, you probably got uncomfortable. We’re not supposed to talk about faith and business together.
We’ve been taught to see life segregated into two different areas: your public/work life versus your personal/private life. Work and business go on public side. Faith goes on the private side.
You shouldn’t bring your faith to work, right?
Wrong.
You definitely need to be careful about how you bring your religion to work, but your work success is directly dependent on faith. In fact, all aspects of your life depend directly on faith. Understanding Faith Faith is another way of saying trust. Faith is another way of saying confidence.
In fact, the word confidence comes from pairing the prefix con which means with (remember your Spanish classes?) and fide which means faith. Confidence means with faith.
When you say that you have confidence in someone you are saying that you have faith in them
Fidelity means that you keep the faith with another. When a person cheats on their spouse, they commit an infidelity. The Marine Corps motto is Semper Fidelis. Always faithful.
The word trust comes Old Norse meaning strength. How much trust, how much strength, is there in your relationship with your spouse, friend or business partner?
You make thousands of acts of faith every day. You have faith that your alarm clock will wake you at the right time. You have faith that your money in your bank account is still there. You have faith that flipping the light switch won’t electrocute you, that the water you drink isn’t poisonous and that people you don’t know will stay in their lane on the highway.
Without those thousands of acts of faith each day, you couldn’t function. Our society would collapse.
Countries where people have strong faith in their justice, banking and political systems do well. When people doubt fundamental systems, bad things happen.
Faith should never be based in blindness or ignorance. The best faith is always be based in evidence—like previous experience. I have faith that I won’t get electrocuted flipping the light switch because I’ve done it hundreds of thousands of times and I’m still alive. I have faith in my auto mechanic because he’s always been honest with me in the past. Faith and Work Your business is based on faith. Do you have faith that your people do the things you ask them to do? Do you have faith your clients will pay you? Do you have faith that your team is fully committed to each other and the goals?
What happens to your personal and team performance when you lose faith in your managers, your team, or your clients, bank or suppliers?
When we lose faith, we hedge. We don’t fully commit. We spend time and energy on backup plans. Performance drops. Anxiety skyrockets.
Google’s research on high-performance teams shows that trust—faith—is the key factor in team performance. Faith is more important than talent.
Faith is critical for business success, family success, and success in your relationships with yourself and your friends. Why Use the Word Faith? Okay, so why talk about faith—which some people mistakenly take to mean blind religious faith—when we can use the word trust? Why use a word with potential negative baggage when we can use a word that doesn’t have that baggage?
Two big reasons.
First, the word trust has become so familiar that we use it without thinking much about what it means or how important it is in life. We take it for granted. It has lost its impact.
Using the word faith makes us think about trust in new, more powerful ways. It can remind us that faith in ourselves and each other is one of the 2 or 3 most important things in life. Faith is about the strength of relationship.
Remember, strong relationships don’t just give you high-performance teams, families and friends. As we’ve discussed in earlier blogs, high-quality,
The college admissions cheating scandal is filling the news lately. I led a college prep high school for 14 years and put three daughters through college myself, so I’ve got some experience in that admissions game.
Yes, the college admissions scandal is about cheating.
Yes, the college admissions scandal is about wealthy people having a big advantage over 90% of American families trying to get into elite colleges.
But these are really just symptoms of a deeper and more important problem: our society’s relentless pursuit of Unhappiness.
We are teaching our kids to chase shiny things like status, money, being a starting player on the best travel ball team, getting the most followers on social media, wearing the right brands…
And getting into elite colleges.
We teach our kids to chase these things not because our children will develop into their best self, but because it is socially prestigious. It’s an indicator that our kids are “successful”. It’s an indicator that we are “successful” parents.
That’s the deeper, more important problem. Chasing shiny things in life is making our kids depressed and killing them. How bad is it?
Suicide is the second leading cause of death for people ages 10 to 34. The rate of depression among young people increased 63% from 2009 to 2017. 40% of college kids in spring 2017 said they experienced depression so deep it was difficult for them to function.
Those are statistics. Go read the article, How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Peterson to get a feel for what we’re setting our kids up for.
The author is a 34-year-old “successful” millennial who has spent her life chasing what she’s been told to chase, and she is burned out. Miserable. Deeply unhappy. Read the article and feel her pain.
The article resonates with young people because it captures their life experience. They’ve chased everything we’ve told them to chase and they are burned out. Miserable. Deeply unhappy.
Here’s what is most surprising: In 8,000 words about life, the millennial author never mentions the word Happiness. Never mentions relationship. Never talks about fulfillment in life.
It’s like no one ever told her that life is about Happiness. It doesn’t seem to be in her frame of reference.
We have more education and wealth than ever in human history, yet the suicide and depression rates are skyrocketing.
We’re quite literally teaching our kids to chase shiny things in life that destroy them psychologically, spiritually and physically.
All in the name of attending the elite academic or athletic school. All in the chase for shiny things that we call “success”.
All in a relentless pursuit of Unhappiness.
What’s the answer? We need to teach our kids the real meaning of life—Happiness—and how to pursue it.
This week I visited my friend, Dave, who just had a tumor removed from his brain. He showed me what looked like a hundred staples running across his head. Fortunately, the tumor was benign.
When he was diagnosed, hundreds of friends came to visit. While he was in surgery, more than 60 people gathered and prayed for him at the hospital. His family, friends, partners and employees were all behind him because they love him.
Dave told me he was ok if the tumor was malignant because he knew that life and Happiness are all about good relationships—with yourself, with your friends and family, and with your Creator. Dave has those relationships.
Dave is facing a deep life-challenge, and he’s never been more fulfilled.
There’s an 80-year ongoing Harvard Study on Adult Development that backs him on that. It’s very clear: Happiness does not come from money or power or status or education.
Happiness comes from high-quality relationships. Period.
Our society profoundly misses that Truth about Happiness and life. You can’t win by swimming against the societal rip-tide. It’s too powerful. But you can swim out the side of the rip-tide.
A recent Wall Street Journal article, The Tech Whiz Behind Vine and HQ Trivia, tells the story of Colin Kroll. Professional Success Colin was a young, self-taught computer programmer who left Detroit In 2007 to go to New York City and do app coding. He worked 12-hour days at the office and did more work at home.
Eventually, Kroll found backers who funded a video app called Vine. You’ve heard of it. Vine was an app that allowed people to publish 6 second videos that looped. It was a big hit on the Internet. Twitter bought Vine in 2012. Kroll was 28 years old and a multimillionaire.
Those around Kroll through the years always said that he was very smart. Investors backed Kroll in another Internet project—HQ Trivia—that became another Internet hit in 2018.
In terms of money and recognition for his professional skills, Colin Kroll was doing very well. He was the CEO of Intermedia Labs, the company that owned HQ Trivia. He was buying homes. He had a Porsche. He had a $75,000 credit card bill.
Kroll had told one of his advisors, “I’m never worried about making more money…” Tragedy Just two months ago, on December 15, 2018, Colin Kroll was found dead in his apartment. He was 34 years old.
Kroll spent the night before talking with his employees at his company’s holiday party. The next day he was dead. More of the Story Of course, there is more to the story. It is not a new story. It is a very human story that has lessons for all of us.
Colin Kroll was smart. In high school, he used his software coding skills to kick his neighbors off the Internet so he could get more internet cable bandwidth. He regularly got high on pot and prescription drugs.
When he moved to New York City he “worked incessantly” and smoked almost two packs of cigarettes a day. He smoked pot, “occasionally did cocaine” and drank heavily.
Kroll tried to reset his life in 2018. He quit smoking and began to exercise more. Despite those changes, Colin Kroll died last December 15th from an accidental overdose of heroin that was laced with fentanyl.
It might be tempting to write Colin Kroll’s death off as just another example of the dangers of drug use. But a lot more was going on. Relationships The Wall Street Journal article talks a lot about Kroll’s relationships with others. In fact, the article spends more time talking about his relationships than his drug use.
According to friends, Colin Kroll was gentle and endearing. They said that Kroll identified with people who were misfits in life.
To many of those he worked with, Kroll was abrasive. He told a mentor, “Everyone thinks I’m an asshole, and I am an asshole, but I can’t help it because everyone around me is so stupid.”
A partner in one of his companies quit over Kroll’s abrasive behavior. Employees complained that Kroll lashed out at them, that he was moody and that he created a hostile work environment. Articles published about Kroll described him as hard to work with and told stories about women quitting because they found Kroll creepy.
Colin Kroll was imaginative and skilled at work, but he wasn’t very good at relationships. Lessons from the Death of Colin Kroll So, what are some of the lessons we can learn about life from Colin Kroll? Besides the dangers of fentanyl-laced heroin?
We can learn the important difference between knowledge and wisdom. We can learn why our society’s focus on education instead of formation is failing our young people and our society. And we can learn more about the importance of relationships in life. Wisdom over Knowledge Knowledge is defined as the “facts, information and skills acquired by a person through experience or education.” Knowledge is “the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.” Knowledge is a good thing. It is literally about what you know.
But knowledge and wisdom aren’t the same thing.
Wisdom is more than knowledge. Wisdom is the combination of knowledge plus character.
Marine Corps Officer Candidate School Way back in the summer of 1985, I spent my June and July in a special kind of hell called Marine Corps Officer Candidates School—Marine OCS.
Most people, when they hear the word “school”, think that Marine Officer Candidate School would be a place where you learned how to be an officer in the Marine Corps.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Marine OCS was all about putting you under a tremendous amount of physical, mental and emotional pressure to see if you could make good decisions and lead people while tired and stressed.
I remember getting called into the drill instructor’s office (called is the polite word) as part of a group getting commendations for scoring high on the Marine physical fitness test. That lasted about 15 seconds.
Then they yelled at us to get out.
As I ran back to my rack, I heard my name yelled again. I ran back into the drill instructor’s office as part of a second group—many of whom were in the first group—just in time to get a counseling form for poor performance on the physical fitness test. Pushing Through Failure That was the theme. They put you in no-win situations or gave you tasks with timelines you couldn’t possibly meet, made you encounter failure face-to-face, made you experience failure at your core, then watched to see if you fought through it. Or gave up.
They weren’t worried about being fair to us. They were focused on one question: Can we trust you to lead our beloved Marines in very stressful situations?
The OCS experience made you dig deep into yourself. OCS made you encounter yourself—your good and your bad—in straightforward, sometimes harsh ways.
It forced you to face your relationship with yourself. Happiness is About Relationships From our earlier podcasts, we know that the key to Happiness in life is not money or status or education. An 80-year Harvard study confirms that the key to Happiness in life is high-quality relationships. If you have high-quality relationships, you’ll not only be happier; you’ll also be healthier and live longer.
So where do we have relationships in life? Those are the areas where we should focus our lives for Happiness. The answer is simple. There are six areas of relationship in life. There is your relationship with yourself, your family, your friends, your relationships at work, as a citizen in your community and with the Creator. Six areas of opportunity to pursue Happiness.
In this podcast we’ll discuss some basics about relationships, then we’ll talk about a critical relationship—the relationship you have with yourself. Your Relationships Are Only As Good As You Are The idea of relationship seems obvious, but we can learn some important things from unpacking the concept.
Relationship is fundamental in our lives, with the most important relationship being the one you have with yourself. One of fundamental things that defines you as a human being is that you are self-conscious—that you are in relationship with yourself.
Our relationships with others can only be as good as we are in the relationship.
Think of relationship like a bridge. By its nature, a bridge must have at least two anchor points—one on each side of the span. Two strong anchor points makes the bridge—the relationship—strong. If one of the anchor points is weak, the bridge—the relationship—will be unstable and weak as well.
In fact, a bridge is only as strong as its weakest anchor point.
In the same way, if you are a good person and a strong anchor point, you will have stronger relationships. If you are weak or unsettled, your relationships will suffer. Your relationships can only be as good as you are. Relationships and Trust Relationship is also an act of faith, of trust, in the other. Your relationships are only going to be as strong as the confidence you have in each other.
When you have trust in the other, you can focus your attention on moving forward.
Tragedy, Unhappiness and Burnout This week I read an article about a 27-year old young woman who hanged herself in her New York apartment.
She left her mother apology notes online and in her apartment that read she “felt absolutely nothing during what should have been the happiest and darkest times in my life.”
The notes continue, “I realize I am undeserving of thinking this way because I truly have a great life on paper. I’m fortunate to eat meals most can only imagine. I often travel freely without restriction… However all these facets seem trivial to me…”
And she writes, “It’s the ultimate first world problem, I get it. I often felt detached while in a room full of my favorite people…”
In my blog a couple of weeks ago, Millennials: Pursuing Happiness and Avoiding Burnout, I talked about an article by Anne Helen Petersen that describes how millennials are feeling not just exhausted, but burned out chasing all the things they’ve been told to chase in life.
It was revealing that in almost 8.000 words about life, Petersen never mentioned Happiness or fulfillment or even relationships. Petersen concluded her article basically settling for being more aware of her burnout and attempting to seek some joy in life. The Fundamental Problem: We Don't Know Happiness I think these two stories capture a fundamental problem in our nation. We have more education, more wealth, better health, more travel and more prosperity than ever in history, and yet so many—especially younger people—seem sad, depressed or lack direction.
We need to fix that. We need to understand our meaning and purpose in life so that we can pursue and find fulfillment and Happiness. When we tap into that fundamental Truth about ourselves, we will be in the best position possible to be successful in all areas of our lives.
So, let’s be obvious about it. The meaning of life and your purpose in life are straightforward. The answer is Happiness.
Based on Petersen’s millennial article, it seems like we forgot to tell tens of millions of people that life is about Happiness. And we seem to have forgotten how to pursue Happiness.
Instead, we’ve become thoroughly captured and enthralled by shiny distractions in life. We’re chasing dozens of all the wrong things in life like social status and money, and stuff like the coolest cars and most expensive houses and newest smartphones and the most prestigious schools and travel sports teams.
I’m not saying that its bad to be rich or to appreciate beautiful things. These are all good things that can make our lives better.
But they are not the meaning of life.
They can provide short-term pleasure, but they can never provide long-term fulfillment. If you make the pursuit of these things for their own sake the focus of your life, you will inevitably find yourself in pain, unhappy and unfulfilled. Meaning of Life: Happiness & Relationship So, this is the first in a series of blog posts where we will talk about the purpose and meaning of your life—Happiness—and how you can pursue it.
We’ll take the best ancient, timeless wisdom and apply it to our current times and circumstances.
We’ll talk about some simple lessons that you can use to become successful and fulfilled in every area of your life—your personal life, your family life, and your life with your friends and at your work.
Let’s talk about your life, your Happiness and your success. Let’s make it simple and easy to understand so you can apply it all areas of your life. So you can hand the Truth about Happiness and success to your own children.
Let’s start with Happiness itself. We’ll define Happiness generally as a way of life that brings you deep contentment, satisfaction and lasting joy.
So, if Happiness is not about money or status or fame, where do you find it? As we talked about in an earlier blog, Meaning of Life: Happiness, you find Happiness in high-quality relationships.
That’s not my opinion.
Attacking the Bad and Stupid People So, America, are we pissed off at each other enough yet?
It is seductive and easy to get pissed off at bad people. Stupid people.
You know the ones. The idiots out there on the other side. The fake news ones. They are ignorant. Selfish. Hateful. They deserve whatever bad things happen to them.
Doesn’t it feel good to be righteous? To defend your truth? To fight for something you believe in? To tolerate the good stuff and be virtuously intolerant of what they’re doing?
Doesn’t it feel good to attack and denounce the bad and the stupid? Pat yourself on the back for making another tweet or Facebook post that points out their stupidity and evil with a witty and nasty retort.
We need to stop.
We need to stop this incessant, mean-spirited attacking of others. The attacks are stupid and self-destructive. Our attacks destroy our ability to live together as Americans; they threaten our own national security; and the more we attack each other the more it changes us—you and me—into ugly and mean-spirited people.
None of this attacking helps us achieve success and happiness as individuals or as an American nation. Let’s stop. Bad Faith, Prejudice and Bigotry Think about it. Most of our attacks start with the presumption that our opponent is bad and stupid. That’s why we are attacking them. We’ve probably never met the other person. We just know that they are bad because of their race or class or job or their pussy hat or MAGA hat or where they live or their political thoughts. And that justifies being mean to them.
We don’t really know them, but we’re willing to pre-judge and attack them based on their race or class or whatever. That’s prejudice.
We make no effort to know or understand them before we attack. We don’t listen to what they say in good-faith to understand them. Nope. Instead, we interpret everything they say in the worst possible way so we can have another opportunity to attack. Our attacks are in bad faith and prejudiced. That makes us bigots too.
When another is that bad and stupid, they aren’t a real person. Or at least they don’t deserve to be treated like a person. They are evil. They are demons. And so, they should be treated like demons. Demonizing Others Destroys Us But demonizing “others”, treating them like things, not people, has a long history of turning into truly evil situations like genocide, slavery, internment and mob lynchings. When you dehumanize others in your attacks, you begin a walk down a very dangerous path.
There’s more.
Attacking and demonizing others destroys your ability to develop good relationships with other people. It divides us deeply and emotionally. It poisons future opportunities for a relationship with that person or those people.
We lose the ability to come together as a community or nation to solve problems. That makes life much harder for everyone.
Demonizing others can destroy our own family and friendships. When we attack, we can find ourselves throwing away decades of friendship over a disagreement on some election.
And perhaps most important, when we are mean to others, when we attack and demonize them, we change ourselves. We become what we do, what we practice. It becomes a habit. It becomes part of our character, of who we are. We become mean-spirited, hateful people.
Every time we demonize another person we take another step on a path to mean-spiritedness and hatefulness. That meanness will inevitably seep into other aspects of our lives.
We know from an earlier blog that Happiness in life is all about high-quality relationships with other people. We know that work success depends on having great relationships with our clients and our co-workers.
Happiness and success—everyone wants that, right?
Well, demonizing others destroys our Happiness and success by destroying our ability to have high-quality, high-performance relationships. Demonizing others poisons the trust needed for...
Last week a writer from the millennial generation, Anne Helen Petersen, published an essay, “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation”. My millennial daughter recommended it to me. She said Petersen’s article captured the way she and many in her age group feel about life.
Petersen’s article is a good read that captures the real pain—the burnout—that millennials are feeling today.
Before any conservatives out there automatically dismiss her article because it’s on the liberal Buzzfeed website, just read and actively listen to the experience she describes. There is a lot to learn.
Baby Boomers and GenX people may be tempted to dismiss Petersen’s work as millennial whining. Don’t.
The burnout she talks about is real. This is not whining. The pain is being experienced by many in her generation. I think Petersen has done a very good job of describing that pain and grounding it in good stories and examples.
We need to listen because we care about our millennials and because her article can provide us some important insights and lessons about life.
Millennial burnout is telling us that something is off the tracks. We need to fix that.
I’ll give a synopsis, but make sure you read Petersen’s article. It is long and well-worth the time spent. You need to feel the burnout through her writing. It’s the burnout of a generation. Synopsis The article begins by describing the burnout in terms of having to chase endless items on to do lists. This endless chase is exhausting and eventually paralyzing. Petersen was doing the important, even difficult tasks, “But when it came to the mundane, the medium priority, the stuff that wouldn’t make my job any easier or work better, I avoided it.”
Through the rest of her piece, Petersen describes what she believes are the cause and history of the burnout.
Much of it is about how Petersen believes millennials were optimized by their parents to win in life. They weren’t allowed the dangerous activities of previous generations like playground jungle gyms or riding bikes without helmets. No teeter-totters or BB guns. Unstructured play became play dates. Unchanneled energy got medicated. Intensive parenting. Moms who became momma-bears and over-protected their kids.
And then there were the expectations. Petersen says,
“Those expectations encapsulate the millennial rearing project, in which students internalize the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all of this childhood optimization: doing work that you’re passionate about . Whether that job is as a professional sports player, a Patagonia social media manager, a programmer at a startup, or a partner at a law firm seems to matter less than checking all of those boxes.”
Petersen and millennials clearly think meeting those expectations is increasingly hard or impossible. They are loaded with college debt. Many had to live with their parents after college graduation. As she says:
"It’s also about the psychological toll of realizing that something you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be “worth it” — worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization — isn’t ."
And social media makes it worse. Petersen says:
"One thing that makes that realization sting even more is watching others live their seemingly cool, passionate, worthwhile lives online. We all know what we see on Facebook or Instagram isn’t “real,” but that doesn’t mean we don’t judge ourselves against it . I find that millennials are far less jealous of objects or belongings on social media than the holistic experiences represented there, the sort of thing that prompts people to comment, I want your life. That enviable mix of leisure and travel, the accumulation of pets and children,
Peggy Noonan and Magic Ponies... A few weeks ago, I made a quick post about a column by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal about Americans—that’s you and me—and politics and “magic ponies.” With a new Congress coming in and the 2020 election already starting, it made sense to go into greater depth on this issue.
Noonan argues that Americans are voting for “magic ponies” like Trump and Obama based too much on emotion and not enough on their experience and judgment.
She is correct.
That failure to vote for wisdom and experience is a symptom of a much deeper and more threatening problem facing America. Facing us. Facing you and me.
And that problem is us. The problem is you and me. America is United by Ideals, Not Blood or Ethnicity Almost all nations in world history are grounded in ethnicity or tribe. You are Japanese because you are born Japanese. You are Tutsi because you were born in the Tutsi tribe.
In these nations, the people look to the rulers, the government, to solve their problems because those are the people who rule the nation or tribe. Its what they’ve been doing from the beginning. They are citizen-subjects of their ruling government
America is different. We are not united by blood or ethnicity. We are united by commitment to the American ideals expressed in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
In the American military and in our citizenship oath, we don’t swear allegiance to a king or ruler. We swear allegiance to “support and defend the Constitution.” Citizen-Leaders Not Citizen-Subjects Our politicians are not the leaders of America. We The People–you and me–are the defined leaders of America. We are not citizen-subjects of the government. We are citizen-leaders in our own nation.
That citizen-leadership goes way beyond the government. Through most of our history, We the People solved most of our problems using private associations. We formed non-profits, private associations and charities to tackle challenges like health care, education, homelessness and many other problems.
Tackling problems as private citizen-leaders does several important things. When we help others directly, we develop our own character, compassion and sense of community. All these are keys to Happiness in life.
When we are the leaders solving problems, we take ownership of the problems, investing ourselves in solving those problems. As citizen-leaders working through private associations, we solve problems more effectively, efficiently and with better response than the government can.
Finally, Americans have always been wary of a federal government that gains too much power and becomes tyrannical. Our Constitution is written to have three co-equal branches of federal government. The branches exercise checks and balances over each other, preventing any one branch from having too much power. That is designed to keep the federal government itself from having too much power and becoming tyrannical.
When we tackle problems ourselves, as citizen-leaders, we keep the power with the people, not the government. We prevent tyranny and maintain our freedom.
In his famous 1830’s book, Democracy in America, Alexis De Tocqueville tours America and notes this fundamental difference between America and Europe. In Europe, citizen-subjects are dependent on the ruling class and government to lead and do things for them. In contrast, Americans take leadership onto themselves, forming associations with other Americans to accomplish things. Our Failure as Citizen-Leaders Today, We the People, you and I, are failing as citizen-leaders in at least two ways.
First, as citizen-leaders, we are responsible for choosing the best representatives possible to manage our government day-to-day. Nevertheless, the media is filled with complaints about our government from all sides. We seem to be very unhappy with the representatives we choose.
The problem is,
Merry Christmas!
Just a week ago, we passed the Winter Solstice. Darkness dominates our days and sometimes our moods.
Just days after the light begins its return, we celebrate Christmas—the birth of Jesus, Divine Love, into our world. Our Divided Nation Light and Love could not come at a better time. Despite all our technology, wealth, knowledge and progress, we are in a bitter time. Our nation is deeply divided economically, socially and politically.
We are spending enormous amounts of time, energy and emotion yelling at each other and demonizing each other. We’ve lost the ability to have a calm, rational discussion about things.
We aren’t listening to each other in good faith, trying to understand what others truly mean. Instead, we interpret what the Others say in the most negative way we can. Then we attack them based not on what they meant, but on our negative interpretation.
It is a setup. The purpose is not to get to the Truth. The purpose is to create an image of others that we can attack. To scorch them. To destroy them, if we can.
It can feel so good to be self-righteous, and to demonize and attack others.
This demonization and division going on in our nation is very dangerous, however. It puts our national security at risk, damages our ability to achieve success, and makes each of us mean-spirited, awful people.
This behavior weakens our nation socially, politically, psychologically and spiritually. Worst of all, our nastiness threatens our own national security. This brutal infighting sends a message to our international foes that we are divided and weak. Danger to Our National Security We have lived comfortably in a Pax Americana since World War II. We have little understanding of the real horrors of war. Our battles have been fought on other continents. The vast majority of us have never really sacrificed for our national security.
But we face some rising foes who want to destroy our nation and they are developing the capability to do it. If these interpret our division as weakness, it can embolden them to attack us.
Overstated? Not at all. There are plenty of examples of American intentions being misinterpreted with nasty, unintended results.
North Korea attacked South Korea in 1950 because they misinterpreted American statements at the time as indicating that the US wouldn’t defend South Korea.
In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait because Saddam Hussein misinterpreted American statements as indicating that the US wouldn’t defend Kuwait.
Russia invaded Crimea 2014 and Georgia in 2008 because Russian leadership figured the US and NATO wouldn’t oppose those invasions.
We’re currently head-to-head with Russia in Europe, China in the South China Sea and Iran in the Persian Gulf. Our internal social and political division sends them the dangerous message that we are weak. It can be tempting to take advantage of an opponent while they are weak.
We need get our act together for our own national security. Danger to Our American Understanding of Life One of the greatest things about America is that, from the beginning, we have been a nation united not by ethnicity, but by a shared understanding of life, freedom and happiness. We thrive when we embrace that shared understanding of life, making good-faith compromises with each other to move forward as a team.
Right now, TEAM USA is a mess.
As I discuss in my book, On Leadership: What’s Broken in Our Society and How We Fix It, that fundamental American understanding of life is under deep attack in our nation. If we fail to reaffirm, pursue and unite around that American understanding, we will cease to be America. We’re going to find ourselves unhappy and in deep trouble socially, economically and politically. We better get our act together to survive as a nation. Personal Danger Finally, few things are as tempting or make you feel as good as denouncing bad people in the name of moral righteousness.
It is so easy to get caught up in the busy-ness of life and find the weeks, months and even years flying buy.
We are chasing so many immediate things in life—getting the best job, getting our kids into the right schools and on the right sports teams, living in the right neighborhoods and driving the right cars—that it is easy to lose sight of what life is about.
And that’s dangerous. There are two things in life that are certain: death and taxes.
If you don’t pay attention to your taxes, the IRS will actively seek you out. The IRS will make you pay attention.
Life, on the other hand, will simply keep going on whether you are paying attention or not. A lot of people simply go through life, never really conscious of their own life, never living with intention or purpose. They get old or die and wonder where it all went. I can’t imagine a bigger regret than going through life unconscious, simply letting life happen to you.
That gets us to a very important question: Why? Why do you do what you do? What is your life leading to? What is your life destination?
Knowing the Why will make you more successful in all aspects of your life—at work, at home with your family, and in your own Happiness. "Why" and Success in Your Life So why do you do what you do? Where is your life going?
The answer to that should be Happiness. Fulfillment.
As I discussed in an earlier blog/podcast, The Meaning of Life: Happiness, history, tradition and, most of all, research tell us pretty clearly what makes us happy and fulfilled in life: high-quality relationships with others.
Let’s step that up: Happiness is all about having high-quality, high-trust relationships based in love.
Everything you do in life should point you towards Happiness. Anything that isn’t pointing you towards Happiness is quite literally a waste of your time.
Everything you do in life should be building high-quality, high-trust relationships based in love.
So, if you want Happiness and fulfillment in life, you should be constantly asking yourself why you do what you do. And the answer to that why should be that your action helps you build high-quality, high-trust loving relationships in your life.
Why practice being honest, just, wise, loving and courageous? Because when these become habits, when they become part of your character, you become the best person you can be –and that contributes directly to your high-quality, high-trust, loving relationships.
Why practice loving your family? Because it makes you a better person and because it teaches your children how to develop their own high-quality, high-trust, loving relationships. It is the most important thing you can teach them so they can achieve success in life—in their own families, in their work, as leaders in their own communities, and in their own lives.
Why care about the schools your children go to or activities they participate in? Because their experience in school builds knowledge and their team-based activities build character, leadership and teamwork. The knowledge they learn and the character they build develops wisdom. Having wisdom puts them in the best position possible to… Wait for it… Develop the high-quality, high-trust, loving relationships they will need to be successful in life. As leaders in their work, In their families and in their communities.
Why should you be physically, spiritually and psychologically fit? Because it puts you in the highest-quality, loving relationship with yourself. That, in turns, puts you in the best position to have great relationships with others.
Each week, we should review our activities—past and future—and ask why we are doing them. If our activities are not contributing to high-quality relationships with others (or ourselves), then we should replace them with activities that do.
In the big picture, developing high-quality relationships gives us, our children and those around us the best chance for Happiness in life.
Over the last week, our nation has taken time to honor the life of George H.W. Bush, our 41st president. Thousands viewed him in the Capitol in Washington DC and in Houston. We televised two of this three funeral services. Thousands more stood along the tracks while his presidential train took him to his final resting place in College Station, Texas.
Honor is the respect we owe someone because of the kind of person he or she is. For the character that they demonstrate. We have spent the last week honoring President Bush because, no matter where we stand politically, we respect the man he was, what he did with his life and the example he set. All for us.
If we’re smart, we will take powerful lessons from his life to make our own individual lives and our nation better. It is the best way to become good people ourselves and to honor a man who gave so much to all of us.
The life of President George H. W. Bush has many lessons for us, big and small, personal and national. Let’s talk about four of them:
Strength and Resiliency America Unity Love and Fruitfulness
STRENGTH AND RESILIENCY In our world today, some young people seem to have the idea that they are entitled to a good life, relatively free from pain, in which the world revolves around them.
to be taught to see themselves as victims of one kind or another. Then they are taught that they can use that victim-hood as leverage to demand something they are told they are entitled to.
Being a victim is seen as a way that young people can empower themselves. To be fair, I am not blaming the young people who have this attitude for having it. It is what they have been taught.
Today’s “snowplow parents” clear all obstacles out of the way to protect their children from anxiety. Parents complete their kids’ college applications. They show up at their kids’ work to talk to the boss. Many parents do everything they can to cover for their child’s failures.
I don’t think this approach is a formula for success in life. Even though our society has more money, education and technology than any time in history, our young people are more anxious and depressed than ever. Many young people seem hopeless and adrift. They don’t seem resilient. Suicide has become the second leading cause of death for them.
Let’s contrast that with the life of George H.W. Bush.
George Bush was part of the Greatest Generation—that group of people who grew up in America during the Depression and led us through World War II and the Cold War. The Greatest Generation had a character and toughness formed from the hunger and poverty of the Dust Bowl and Depression. A strength that we seem to lack today.
George Bush was undoubtedly blessed to be born into a family with money. His father was an investment banker who later became a US senator. He went to one of the best prep schools in the nation and, after World War II, graduated Yale.
On the other hand, Bush faced tragedy and hardship in his life.
At just 20 years old, President Bush was a Navy pilot in World War II who was shot down on a mission over some tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Bush’s two crewmen on that mission died. Nine men from other aircraft escaped their planes. Bush was the only one rescued by Americans. The other eight were captured by the Japanese, tortured and executed.
Put yourself or a 20-year-old you know in an airplane in the middle of the Pacific… getting shot down… then losing your own crew-mates and more than 10 others on your team.
That wasn’t the only hardship Bush faced. He married Barbara while in the Navy and they had six children. Barbara and George were only 28-29 years old when they lost their 3-year-old daughter, Robin, to leukemia. How painful was the loss? George wrote his daughter Robin a letter:
There is about our house a need. We need some soft blonde hair to offset those crew cuts. We need a doll house to stand firm against our forts and racquets...
It’s time again for Thanksgiving! A History of Giving Thanks For most of our history, Americans have generally thought that life was hard deal. Life was tough. Difficult. Not supposed to be fair. If you worked hard and had some good luck, you might scratch out a decent life for yourself and your family. Maybe even a life a little better than your parents had.
Hard work and suffering developed toughness, resilience, character and leadership.
So, when something good happened—perhaps a good harvest in the fall or the peace after the horrors of the Civil War—Americans took the time to celebrate that goodness and give thanks for what they had. Safety from harm. Good fortune. The end of difficult times. The freedom to establish a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
In the midst of their hardships in life, Americans took time to give thanks to each other and the Creator for whatever blessings they had received.
Today, Thanksgiving is time to celebrate with family. Time to relax and prepare for the upcoming holidays. Time to get together and tell stories. Maybe even some time to get a nap in before standing in the long Black Friday lines.
Many of us, around the Thanksgiving dinner table, will stop and take some time to share what we are thankful for.
Like America, Thanksgiving stretches across boundaries, generations and ethnicities. One of my daughters’ co-workers, an immigrant from Afghanistan, told my daughter a story about how her children, at Thanksgiving, “hyper-demand” turkey and mashed potatoes. It’s a powerful way they, as Americans, share a common tradition with all other Americans.
All these are good things. Life is Hard That said, in today’s world giving thanks can seem counter cultural. How can we give thanks when we’re all battling challenges of one kind or another? Family problems. Problems at work. Financial problems.
The pressure can seem tremendous. Most families in America feel the financial pressure of trying to live paycheck to paycheck. They feel the social pressure of having to live in the right house in the right neighborhood while driving the right car. Our kids must be star athletes and go to the best colleges, or the family prestige is threatened.
With email and texting, we can never fully escape the pressures of work.
24/7 news cycles bombard us with continuous bad news about the nasty, never-ending and all-consuming political fights in Washington DC.
Social media connects us so well that we are no longer developing the tight, personal relationships that used to allow us to share our burdens with others. When we need support from others the most, we seem to have it the least. We have never been so well-connected and simultaneously so alone.
It’s no surprise that we’re more and more anxious and depressed as our own lives never match the perfection others project on Facebook or Instagram. Un-Thanksgiving: Victims and Entitlements That’s the backdrop to some growing and dangerous trends in our culture. Some un-Thanksgiving trends. Thanks for blessings are replaced with demands for entitlements.
The un-Thanksgiving trends push the idea that you don’t earn a good life, but that you’re entitled to a good life. That any pain and suffering in life aren’t opportunities for growth, but an unfair betrayal of that entitlement.
These postmodern trends push us to see ourselves as the victims of others who owe us something.
I am entitled to what I want in life and you owe it to me. And if I don’t get what I want from you, I am entitled to demonize you and bully you and be a jerk to you.
These are un-Thanksgiving trends. When you don’t get what you want you are supposed to be angry. When you do get what you want you aren’t supposed to give thanks because you were entitled to it from the beginning.
Un-Thanksgiving is dangerous because it is profoundly self-centered. You can’t understand me because we have nothing in common. I am victim.
The Marine Corps Birthday Last night, I took a friend of mine, Tony, out for an important evening. He’s 96 years old, a retired school superintendent, teacher and deacon. I think he is the father of seven. We went to an event that had about 200 people of all ethnic groups, ages 20 to 96. It included a billionaire, federal judges, musicians, attorneys, business people, and moms and dads. Blue collar and white collar. A diverse group bound by one thing: the birthday we share as US Marines.
It’s a thing. Every November 10th, Marines all around the world celebrate the birthday of their Corps.
In 1775, 243 years ago, the Marine Corps was born in a tavern in Philadelphia. Today, Marines will celebrate their birthday in formal balls, by sharing a birthday meal in a trench in Afghanistan, or even just by saying “Happy Birthday, Marine” to each other.
So, what can a fighting organization founded almost 250 years ago in a bar teach us about life today? A lot, I think. Let’s talk about three life lessons—story, diversity and relationships. Story The Marine Corps spent much of its history as a military afterthought. It's obvious that every nation needs an army to defend its land and a navy to defend its seas. But do we need a Marine Corps?
Marines started as soldiers at sea who guarded the captain from potentially mutinous sailors and boarded enemy ships in combat. But mutiny hasn’t been a serious issue for almost 200 years and no one today is firing muskets at an enemy crew.
Sure enough, our Marine Corps has been threatened with extinction several times in American history. Even after the Marine Corps performed spectacularly in World War II, many in government (and the Army) tried to abolish the Marine Corps. Your Marine Corps.
If you talk to the Army or Air Force, the Marine Corps survives because the Corps has great public relations. But that misses a deeper lesson. The Marine Corps survives—even thrives—because the Marine Corps understands the importance of telling a compelling story.
All the military services have honor and courage and commitment. But the Marine Corps brings those virtues alive in a super-powerful way by transforming them from theoretical ideas into real-world stories.
In 1847, during the Mexican-American War, the Marines played a role in the capture of Chapultepec Castle on the approaches to Mexico City. The Marines quickly published the story of their role in the battle as an example of Marine heroism. From the Halls of Montezuma….
In 1805, during the war against the Barbary states, seven Marines led several hundred mercenaries across the Libyan desert to fight the Battle of Derna. The battle itself didn’t mean much. It was fought after the Barbary war had ended. But the Marines turned this relatively inconsequential battle into an epic story. To the Shores of Tripoli….
The Marines turned their role in these relatively minor battles into their Story. They told that Story in song:
From the Halls of Montezuma,
To the Shores of Tripoli...
The first two lines of the Marine Corps Hymn, a song that a surprising number of Americans know.
The Marines didn’t just turn these battles into epic stories and song, they made them concrete in their uniforms and tradition. The red stripe on the legs of the Marine Dress Blue uniform remembers the Battle of Chapultepec. All Marine officers have a Mameluke sword, given to the Corps in remembrance of the Battle of Derna.
Going into the Spanish-American War, there was a move to abolish the Corps. The Marines happened to be the first forces to land in Cuba and won a relatively small, but tough battle at Cuzco Wells. The American newspapers—desperate for news about the war—made the Marines heroes.
In World War I, the US Army fought hard, but didn’t allow newspaper reporters to accompany them. The Marines took the reporters with them into battle. In the US, the heroic exploits of the Marines at Belleau Wood and Chateau Thierry filled th...
Love and Happiness Today, we’re going to begin an ongoing conversation about the importance and power of love.
Love is obviously a subject very present in our lives. When we are in love we’re happy. When we’re out of love we’re heartbroken and unhappy. We love our parents and our kids. Love is the subject of more than half the hit songs on the radio.
As present as love is in our lives, I don’t think we have a good understanding of love. Maybe we’re too familiar with it. Maybe we take it for granted.
All too often we think of love as little more than falling in romantic love with someone. No doubt, romantic love—eros—is awesome. It feels great. It’s exciting. Maybe even intoxicating.
But love is much bigger than that. It includes love for your parents and your children. Love for your friends. The self-giving love that leads some people to sacrifice their lives for others.
Love isn’t just something we feel. Love is also action.
In my blog, The Meaning of Life: Happiness, we talk about the importance of relationship for Happiness in life. A study that Harvard has been doing for more than 70 years shows that the most important thing for happiness in life is having high-quality relationships.
Happiness does not come from money. Or fame. Or social status.
Happiness is deeply tied to having great relationships. And the best relationships are love-based relationships. Loving relationships with your friends. With your spouse. With your children. With your co-workers.
Being loved by others changes us. When we practice loving others, it changes us too.
Not just changed emotionally, but physically changed. We’re biologically wired for love. It’s embedded deeply in our DNA.
That Harvard study didn’t just show that high-quality relationships make you happier in life. People with good relationships are healthier and actually live longer. Let’s flip it the other way. Loneliness, the lack of love, is as deadly as smoking or alcoholism.
There’s more. Babies. It turns out that if you give infants all the food and water they need—if you give them all the nutrition they need—but you don’t give them love and physical affection, almost 40% of them will die. A 40% death rate for babies who don’t receive love. More than half of the infant survivors will have significant psychological challenges.
The simple and yet profound answer for the meaning of life--for Happiness--is having good, loving relationships.
Love is the foundation for a healthy and happy life.
When you understand and practice love, you'll receive enormous benefits in life.
You’ll have better relationships with your spouse and children and family.
You’ll be a much more successful leader at work.
You’ll have the best chance for fulfillment and happiness in your own life.
Love is at the very core of life. The more you understand love, the better you’ll be at every aspect of your life.
One experience taught me a very important lesson about love and life. It’s make-or-break.
What you believe about love--what you know about love--dramatically impacts your understanding of life. A Story About Death and Love True story. I had a friend at the gym who was an accomplished doctor with an Ivy League education. Very smart. Very intellectual.
He claimed to be an atheist, and we had interesting and thoughtful conversations about life. He had a nice wife who I saw frequently at church. It seemed clear, by the way he talked about and treated her, that he was very much in love with her.
So we had our conversations—mostly fun intellectual sparring about life—while riding stationary bikes in the gym.
One day our talk was interrupted by a loud crash behind us. A person working out on one of the elliptical machines had collapsed. The doctor jumped off his stationary bike and helped save that person’s life.
I didn’t see the doctor again for some time. Our workout schedules didn’t coincide.
In this blog, we’ll talk about the Meaning of Life, Happiness, what that means and what you can start doing right now to achieve it.
You can find a podcast version of this blog article on our website or iTunes.
If you want to dive in to the issue of leadership, you can get my book, “On Leadership, What’s Broken in Our Society and How We Fix It” on Amazon.com. What is Happiness? If you ask people what they want in life, they’ll almost always tell you that they want Happiness. Isn’t that what we all want? Isn’t the meaning of life Happiness? But that always gives rise to the next questions: What is happiness and how do we get it?
And that’s usually as far as we go in the discussion. Talking about what Happiness is and how we might achieve it gets too complicated too quickly. Is it about having money? How much money? Being healthy? Living a long time? Being with the person you love? Owning a Ferrari? The Dodgers finally winning a World Series? Are those the things that Happiness is about?
If you’ve had a few philosophy classes, the question of Happiness can get buried in all sorts of technical distinctions between happiness and joy and thriving and flourishing and whatever. A great topic for a few beers at the pub or a late-night dorm discussion gets quickly lost in philosophical technicalities.
Besides, who has time to think about happiness when we are struggling to make it to our next pay check, get the mortgage paid and get the kids from school to their sports practices. Most of us are too worried about keeping our jobs and getting our kids into college. Who has time to think about Happiness in life when we’re just trying to survive in life?
Life is complicated and high-speed and overwhelming. But we can fix that. What if we had a simple way of understanding the meaning of life—Happiness—and some straightforward strategies to get there? What if we could do things today that helped us be happy through the rest of our lives?
Let me tell you the story of a guy who grew up in southern California. A few people had put together a concept to make and sell high-quality baseball cards, but they needed some help. So, one of them brought in his high school buddy, Richard, as an investor and accountant.
Over the next 10 years, Richard built the company into a giant. He became a billionaire who also owned a charter jet company. Richard was a guy who had it all: business success. Fame. Boatloads of money. Airplanes and billionaire status.
But he died at the age of 59. Alcohol poisoning. He was suffering from addiction and alcohol dementia. In his climb to becoming a billionaire he had cheated partners and lost many of his old and close friends. He had destroyed most of the important relationships in his life. His billionaire status and business success did not prevent him from drinking himself to death, apparently deeply unhappy.
Let’s contrast that with the story of a woman from a small town in Alabama. She grew up in a simple house with perhaps three rooms. She left home at the age of 18 the day after her high school graduation. She moved to the state capital and found a job. Eventually she met the man who became her husband. He was moving from job to job, not making much money. They got married and he became a union tradesman Between the two of them, they made a modest living.
She had challenges in life. She lost her only son shortly after he was born. She raised her two daughters while her husband was away for long periods on construction jobs. For the last five years of her life she battled health problems that had her in and out of the hospital. The last 18 months of her life were quite hard and painful before she passed away in the spring of 2017.
Those close to Anne will tell you that she died happy. Despite the life challenges and suffering, she was happy because she had close, loving relationships in her life. With her husband of 57 years. With her daughter and grandchildren.
In this blog, we are starting an ongoing discussion about leadership. First, we’ll talk about how fundamental leadership is in our lives. Then we’ll talk about definitions of leadership resulting in what I believe is the best definition of leadership. Finally, I am going to ask you to share your thoughts, experiences and questions about leadership. I want to hear what you think and why. This is a discussion, after all! Real talk about life.
You can find a podcast version of this blog article on our website or iTunes.
If you want to dive in to the issue of leadership, you can get my book, “On Leadership, What’s Broken in Our Society and How We Fix It” on Amazon.com. Why Leadership is Important: Leadership and Life Are the Same Leadership is very important for at least three reasons.
First, leadership is personal to all of us. You are a leader at work. You are a leader in your own family. And hopefully, you are leading your own life towards fulfillment and Happiness. If you are going to be successful in life, you must be a good leader in all these areas. Leadership isn’t something that someone else does. Leadership is something you do and experience every day.
Second, you are a citizen-leader. As Americans, we all have the responsibility for being leaders of our nation, states and local communities. Our Constitution begins with “We the people of the United States,” and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address noted that we have a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” You are a citizen-leader with the responsibility to choose the day-to-day leaders in our government. To choose good leaders, you must understand leadership.
Finally, leadership is at the very core of our society. It permeates every aspect of our lives. Every day, depending on the situation, we constantly trust the leadership of others and others trust our leadership.
At work, we trust that senior leaders keep things headed in the right direction while we lead our people and teams in our projects.
In our families, parents lead kids through the first 20 years of their kids’ lives and then the kids often lead their parents through the last 10 years of their parents lives.
Church ministers lead us through spiritual and life challenges.
Doctors, attorneys and bankers lead us through our health, legal and financial issues.
Teachers lead our communities and children in education
General contractors lead us through home renovation
The employees at Trader Joe’s help us find new trending foods and the Geek Squad leads us through the installation of our home theater systems.
Youth athletic coaches lead our kids in the development of teamwork, leadership and character. Or at least we hope they do.
When you think about it, leadership goes on all around us all the time. It is the most basic of human relationships. Leadership has been around since the first time one human guided or taught another.
Leadership is pervasive to our human experience. It permeates every aspect of life. Our personal and professional lives are full of relationships where we trust the leadership of others and they trust our leadership.
Our society depends on billions of these leadership-trust relationships every day. Without them, our society would collapse quickly. Think about some of the areas where we take leadership for granted:
Law Banking and Finance Agriculture and Food Construction and Engineering Health care Government Military Education Logistics Infrastructure (water, roads, electrical) Computing Systems and Information Technology Social and Cultural Affairs
In so many ways, leadership and life are the same thing.
Another way to consider the impact of leadership in our lives is when we encounter poor leadership. What happens and how do you feel when a mechanic or home contractor rips you off? You are supposed to be able to trust their leadership in auto repair or home renovation,