We enjoy reading “News” sources in order to be more informed of what happened and analysis on what it all means, however,  since Tina Brown took over as editor of “Newsweek”, it seems to have become “Newsweek Light”, all about Celebrities with a little “relevant news” thrown in.  I probably will not renew my subscription but there is one section that I do like.  So I’m still on the fence.  It’s the last page of the magazine.  “My Favorite Mistake”  which is usually a short interview of an actor like Ben Kingsley being called suburban, or Dr. Phil making a decision on his own that would affect his and his wife’s life which he regretted, or the famous musician, Lars Ulrich, who talks  about the time that Quentin Tarentino sent him a script written with each scene choreographed supported by music of Metallica (Lars’s Group).  It was an honor, Lars knew it in his gut but he simply did not understand the concept !  Lars didn’t get it!  It was for the movie “Kill Bill”! He didn’t do it. Big Mistake!

Sometimes, none of us get it!  We try to be aware of opportunities, make the right decision, or simply understand; but we just don’t get it.

Listen and You Will Hear

The other day, I was in the coffee shop and a young woman walked in, she was  in a hurry.  There was a short line but it seems she was a regular, so she asked the clerk if she could just grab a cup and begin getting her coffee.  She would pay later.  A woman who was in line in front of her said to the Barrista, “She’s in a hurry, let me pay for her coffee.”  Nice huh?

When the harried gal came back, full cup in hand to pay, the barrista said “Your coffee has been paid by that woman”.   This gal was so involved with being in a hurry, she missed the point entirely.  She said, ” Well, I still need change for the bus!”

Really!  There was no “Thank You”, NO Acknowledgement of a random act of kindness.  No nothin’!

She simply could not get out of her experience of  being harried, that she literally could not see a kindness in her path.  It might have changed the way she saw her entire day.  It could have changed her whole attitude about her life… (well, maybe not).

It did make me think, “What do we miss everyday.”  What wonderful things happen each day that we over look.

What did you overlook today?

Magic? Goodness? Perhaps a miracle?

Oh, and here’s what I like about “My favorite Mistake”; it is that reflection that each mistake is a lesson.  We did not understand the lesson at the time, but when it evolves we can see it very clearly in the rear view mirror.  Perhaps if we slowed down just a little we would have a better view of the experience as it happens.

There’s a wonderful old song by Jimmy Durante about the pleasures of reading. It goes like this:

I’ll never forget the day I read a book.
It was contagious, seventy pages.
There were pictures here and there,
So it wasn’t hard to bear,
The day I read a book.
It’s a shame I don’t recall the name of the book.
It wasn’t a history. I know because it had no plot.
It wasn’t a mystery, because nobody there got shot.
The day I read a book ? I can’t remember when,
But one o’ these days, I’m gonna do it again.

I was reminded of that over the holidays when I did just that; I read a book.

Now, there shouldn’t be anything wonderful or marvelous or unusual about reading a book, people do it every day. But I hardly ever seem to have the time to sit down and read a book cover to cover. Every day I read a couple of newspapers, scan several news websites and read a few political blogs. Each week I read several news or current affairs magazines. But read a book? Who has the time.

That’s why it was so delicious to have the time to put all those newspapers and magazines aside for a few days and open a good book (an anthology of Graham Green’s work including “The Heart of the Matter” – if you must know). It was a real treat to get lost in the world that the author created, to get inside the characters and try to understand their motivations and actions. I even enjoyed the little moments when I felt frustrated because I was going to have to stop reading so I could go and do something else fun!

Whenever I read a good book I’m always reminded at just how powerful words are, and how beautiful they can be. Too often in my work the words I write have to take on a very specific role and that’s merely to explain something complex or communicate something important. What little opportunity there is for flare or flourish or – god forbid – humor is quickly snuffed out by the legions of others who then have to approve and edit the work. The end product is frequently very different from the original one – sucked dry of any imagination or creativity and turned instead into a dry – albeit accurate – statement.

But good writing does more than that. It also reminds me that often we fall into a rut when writing, relying on the same words or phrases to explain or describe something instead of searching for some new way of telling the same story. That routine way of working makes for an efficient way of writing but not always for an elegant or the most effective way. It’s a shortcut but one that can produce a less-than-memorable end result.

Maybe it’s unrealistic to think about workplace communications and literature in the same way. One is all about efficiency and directness, and is often governed by legal requirements about what you can and, perhaps even more importantly, what you cannot say. The other is about creating new worlds, or helping you see your world in a different way. One is all about imagination. The other all too often shaped by a lack of it.

But I don’t accept that business writing has to be soulless. On the contrary, I think making it dull and turgid and leaden only makes it all the more likely that no one will read it or, if they do, that no one will understand or care what it’s about. To reach people, to get them to pay attention, you have to engage them, you have to entertain them before you can ever hope to really inform them.  That doesn’t mean that a memo from the boss to all the staff has to be done as a limerick (though that is not a bad idea come to think of it!) or that the annual report can be done in iambic pentameter as a dramatic play. But it does mean that they can be lively and engaging and still informative.

No one ever says their goal in life is to write ‘the great American memo’ but as most of us are more likely to write a memo than a novel, and certainly much more likely to read one then maybe it’s time to change the way we think about how we write at work and make it something someone actually wants to read rather than simply hitting the ‘delete’ button as soon as they see who its from.

When Shirley was growing up her mum once told her “Christmas is just around the corner.” Being a kid Shirley immediately ran out of the house and around the corner to see Christmas. Naturally she was really disappointed to see it wasn’t there and figured she must have run around the wrong corner. She was getting ready to run around another corner when her mum caught up with her to say that wasn’t what she meant to say.

I think of that story whenever I’m around the fabulous Emma Danger. It reminds me to be careful about what I say. Not just to avoid cursing or using rude words – though that’s definitely important – but to make sure that she understands what it is that I think I am saying. Kids that young are like sponges, but without any kind of sophisticated filter.

What you say is what they hear, whether that’s what you intended or not.

And the same applies to so-called adults. So often at work you think you are saying one thing only to have a big misunderstanding because someone thought you meant something completely different.  Or you thought it was clear you were joking only to find out no one else thought it was funny – that’s when you end up with headlines that scream out “Sinead O’Connor: ‘I was only joking about wanting to murder the Pope.’

What you write can be wrong

That’s even more true for email. With in-person conversations you have body language to help guide your understanding; with phone calls you have tone of voice to give you a clue as to meaning. But with email there is nothing to go on except for the words in front of you, and your perception of the person writing them.

Or just your mood at the time you read them.

Words are tools. Use them well and the results can be amazing. Use them poorly and you can be surprised at how quickly they can blow up in your face.

Open mouth, insert foot

That’s a lesson I have learned painfully as a media relations spokesperson. You think you are saying the right thing only to see your words thrown back at you later and used to make you look silly, stupid or duplicitous. Or all three.

It’s not fun. But it’s taught me that it is so much easier to take the time to pick the right words, and use them in the right order with the right tone, than to spend a lot of time later trying to correct a false impression.

And if all else fails I fall back on the old Will Rogers maxim, “never miss an opportunity to shut up.”

It always starts out with the best of intentions. You are going to go online and look for a recipe for something for dinner, or to see how your favorite sports team got on, but as you are looking for that information something else pops up on your computer – latest on Michael Jackson death trial, or which Republican Presidential candidate has a hidden secret – and you think “well, let’s take a look”. Five hours later you stagger away from the computer with absolutely no clue about what you just saw or why you went online in the first place.

It happens to all of us. It’s a like a giant sinkhole that just draws us in. Even if you are aware of the dangers it sometimes feels as if you have no power to prevent it or stop it once it’s happening.

And it’s such a waste of time

I mean how often have you ever needed or even wanted to have a conversation about 98% of the stuff you read online. And yet you read it. So, what’s going on here and how can you break that habit?

Well, procrastination for one thing. You are avoiding doing something you don’t really want to do, by substituting something else – even if it turns out that you didn’t particularly care about that either. All you’ve done is find a meaningless replacement for something that might be useful.

There’s also the ‘sleaze’ factor. We’re drawn to gossip and chit chat about celebrities, to find out their weaknesses and secrets and sins. And the internet makes that easier than ever. You don’t even have to go looking for it, it seems to find you. And once it’s right in front of you it’s really, really hard to ignore.

How do you break it?

Well, it’s not easy. If it were there wouldn’t be books written about how to break bad habits, there wouldn’t be entire professions devoted to helping people change their minds.

But the first step is wanting to. If you have reached a point where you are just bored about being bored then give yourself some credit for at least recognizing the problem and looking for a solution.

After that, come up with any number of different ways of avoiding mindless surfing and staying focused on what you wanted to find out in the first place. It could be something as simple as writing down on a piece of paper (I know, writing, how radical eh!) what it is you are looking for and keeping that in front of you as you work on the computer. It will help keep you focused on what you set out to do and if you start to stray you just look at the piece of paper and get right back to business.

Time to make time

You could give yourself a set time to surf and even have a little alarm set on your watch or phone or computer that goes off after 15 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever, reminding you that the time is up.

You could allow yourself 30 minutes a day for random, pointless, self-indulgent goofing around online. This way you don’t feel deprived, you get to read up on the latest celebrity gossip or whatever it is that is your weakness, and then once you are done you get on with the rest of your life.

None of these distractions are going away. In fact they are only likely to multiply as we become increasingly ‘connected’ in every aspect of our lives. But just because you are ‘connected’ does not mean you have to become ‘disconnected’ from the rest of the world around you.

All you have to do is decide just how much is enough.

Sometimes you just feel the need to get away, to get out of the City and head out to the country, the mountains, the lakes, the seaside, for some peace and quiet. To escape the constant bombardment of the senses by noise and traffic and lights and sounds and smells. So, recently Shirley and I decided to get away, to go camping. And we discovered that the simple life is not so simple at all.

Getting away from it all

Now we always travel light. When we got on vacation we bring one bag each, regardless of whether we are going to Portland for a weekend or Paris for two weeks (if we ever went to Paris for two weeks that is) so we figured camping would be an equally easy thing to do. Boy were we wrong.

Traveling not-so-light!

By the time we had loaded into the car the tent, the cooler with the food/wine/beer, the box with the cooking gear/plates/cups/utensils, the cooking stove, the sleeping bags, the blow up mattress (OK, so I’m a sissy) and of course books and ukuleles there was barely room for us. We thought that somehow we had overdone it but when we got to our campsite we realized that we were traveling light compared to everyone else.

Some of these campsites – and admittedly they had kids – had five or more chairs, extra tents to cover the picnic tables, bikes, assorted toys, umbrellas, even surf boards. In short, their sites were jam packed and you wonder how they managed to cram all that stuff into their cars – until you realized they were all driving massive SUV’s or oversized mini-vans (isn’t that a contradiction in terms, an oversized mini van!)

In the end we looked like the poor kids on the block living a bleak and impoverished existence.

It’s all relative

Looking around at all the campsites, and all the families trying so hard to get back to nature it reminded me of Gandhi. No, really it did.

Ben Kingsley goes camping

Gandhi always tried to lead a life of simplicity, weaving the cloth for his own clothes, eating frugally etc. But of course he also led a national organization and traveled extensively and worked hard to spread the word of non-violence around the world. And all that took a lot of money so it’s no surprise that one of his biggest supporters – a textile manufacturer – always used to laugh when people praised Gandhi for living a life of poverty, saying “It costs me a lot of money to keep Gandhi in poverty.”

That’s how I felt looking around at the campsite. It costs a heck of a lot of money and takes a huge amount of effort and equipment to get back to nature.

Call of the mild

But you know what. It was all worth it. Once we’d set up the tent, got everything unpacked, the fire going, the cooker cooking, the wine uncorked and beer poured, and looked around and realized that we were in a willow grove, on the edge of the cliff, overlooking the Pacific Ocean with our only companions being some raccoons and  owls, we realized we were back in nature. That night, with the sound of the ocean rolling in as the backdrop I slept better than I had in ages.

Finding the simple life isn’t simple. But it is definitely worth the effort.

I have this theory that the rising rates of dementia and Alzheimer’s are connected to the increasing use of computers. No, don’t go away, it’ll make sense when I explain it. Probably.

Your brain in a computer

See, as computers get more powerful they need more and more memory. And that memory has to come from some where. I know, you probably thought it came from those silicon chip things they stick inside the computer. But I think that’s only part of the answer.

You can’t get something from nothing

I think there is a limited amount of memory in the universe and as you use more in one area you have to take it from somewhere. So, as your PC or Apple gets more and more powerful, and faster and has more memory, it’s coming from the universe – namely me and you. And that’s why, as you marvel at the speed that your computer is working you might also pause to consider that it’s coming at the expense of your Aunt Mabel who, as the rest of the family have noticed, is not quite as quick as she used to be.

Now, I bring this all up because while we may not be able to turn back the technological tide that is sucking up our memory, there are a number of things we can do in our everyday life to help reduce the likelihood that it’s our memory that is sucked up into the iPad.

Pump it up

One is that any exercise you do that gets your heart pumping could also have a big impact on your brain, reducing your risk of dementia or other memory problems. The study, from the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, examined 1,600 research papers and found that most of the science seems to point firmly to exercise as being a great way to not only promote physical health but also mental health.

The best part was that the exercise didn’t have to be hugely strenuous or demanding, it just had to be demanding enough to raise your heart rate and increase your body’s need for oxygen; that could be everything from going to the gym, to going for a walk, raking leaves or shoveling snow.

So, as the fall and winter draw near get out those rakes and shovels. They could help do more than just keep the driveway clear, they could help you keep your mind clear as well.

When bad things happen people often rush to judgement; they are quick to find fault, to figure out who’s to blame and why, and what needs to be done about it. That can happen in something as intimate as a relationship or friendship, in a broader context in the workplace, or – as recently happened in England – on a national scale after a series of violent and deadly riots.

London's Burning

In the days and weeks following the riots in the UK, the newspapers, TV and radio were filled with the voices of the professional pontificating class all mourning the end of standards and manners and all sense of decency, blaming it on the welfare state, the collapse of the family, too much immigration, too little education, a lack of respect for the social order, too much respect for the celebrity culture, and calling for the return of flogging/hanging/birching, the return of the draft, and calling for all those guilty to be locked up and the key thrown away.

Hang ‘em all

All terribly satisfying to write I’m sure but woefully short on any insight into what happened and why and what really needs to be done about it.

But then that’s not too terribly surprising. Because apparently that’s what always happens after things like this. The Economist magazine had a wonderful article that dug back into past coverage of similar upheavals in British society- and I mean way back into the past, through the 1970′s to the 1930′s and the 1880′s and all the way back to 1751, a time when the US didn’t exist and was still a part of the British Empire. What’s fascinating is that regardless of the era or the event, the way commentators wrote back then was exactly the same way they wrote just now.

In the 1950′s for example the arrival of – shock horror – rock n roll in England had the upper classes appalled, as was evident from this article in the Daily Mail; “It is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows rag-time, blues, dixie, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the negro’s revenge.”

Wonderfully lurid stuff

Take a trip a little further back, to 1898, and folks are lamenting the fact that fathers are no longer whipping their kids. I kid you not!

My favorite is from 1913 where one social commentator is warning people of the dangers of – wait for this – silent movies, claiming that watching images of criminals in films will encourage children to copy them. Sound familiar eh! This is what the venerable The Times of London had to say on the subject: “All who care for the moral well-being and education of the child will set their faces like flint against this new form of excitement.”

Like flint.

Boy, they don’t write them like that anymore.

Back in 1862 a crime wave led to the restoration of flogging in England, only a few years after it had been banned. So horrified were the chattering classes back then – and let’s face it we’re talking about rich white geezers – that The Times once again felt obliged to opine on the topic with this editorial; “Our streets are actually not as safe as they were in the days of our grandfathers. We have slipped back to a state of affairs that would be intolerable even in Naples.”

Even in Naples. Clearly there was no such thing as politically correct language back then. (Historical footnote – at the time the English used to consider Naples the epitome of a criminal, dirty, dangerous city; actually, come to think of it they probably thought the same about Glasgow, Lisbon, Vladivostok, Boston and pretty nearly every city in the world except for London – and even then there were certain parts of London they didn’t particularly like)

Don’t rush to judgement

But the point is that there have always been jerks who react with a knee jerk response to anything they don’t understand, or anything that they feel or fear threatens them in any way. That’s not to say that these issues are not important and don’t require serious thought and serious action to make sure they don’t happen again. But just blaming the first group that comes to mind – hooligans, working class youth, thugs, immigrants, people from Naples! – doesn’t do anything to make things better.

Similarly in relationships – personal or professional – just falling back on the same old arguments, the same old reasoning doesn’t resolve any problems, in many ways it just perpetuates them. If something goes wrong and your response is simply to dredge up the past you never get anywhere. You remain stuck forever in the same old manner of thinking. Instead we need to take the time to think about what’s really the problem, why things really are going wrong. Only then can we come up with a solution that will really work.

Otherwise we are no better than people from Naples!

Fast backward

If you thought TV was bad for your brain a new study says it’s doing just as much damage to your heart! In fact this study says that if you watch TV for six hours a day you may be shortening your life by five years. Five years! That’s amazing. Those Kardashian girls are killing you in ways you hadn’t even imagined.

Death Watch

Now this is not some anti-TV nutcase just trying to get you to do something crazy like read books or go for a walk, these are well regarded Australian scientists who have their paper in a respected medical publication – the British Journal of Sports Medicine - and the researchers say that just sitting there watching TV for hours at a time is as dangerous for you as smoking or not doing any exercise (which come to think of it would fall under the sitting watching TV banner as well, but I digress…….)

Now, there’s lots of things I could write about the methodology they used to come up with their findings but that’s rather dry and you can read it if you go to the study itself. What is interesting is that they calculated that in 2008 Australian adults (25 years and older) watched 9.8 billion hours of TV a year.

Now, while allowing for the fact that Aussies are sports mad and that a single cricket game can last five days that’s still a heck of a lot of TV. It makes me wonder how many bad sitcoms did people watch, how many dreadful reality shows, how many episodes of Australian Idol etc.

One hour more = less

Here’s an even scarier statistic from the researchers: each hour of TV watched after the age of 25 reduced the life expectancy of the viewer by just under 22 minutes. In TV terms, that means each episode of ‘Glee’ means your life is reduced by an episode of ‘Two and a half Men’.

Really, fun as ‘Glee’ is, is it worth missing 22 minutes of Charlie Sheen.

Or, to put it another way. Is it worth watching that re-run of Law and Order (for the 12th time) if it means missing out on playing with your kids, your grandkids, your neighbors kids, your wife/husband/partner/lover/cousin/uncle/goldfish? Or just reading a book. Or just going for a walk. Or just hanging out with people you like who have interesting things to say?

Comparable to smoking

Previous studies show that smoking one cigarette can, on average, reduce your life expectancy by 11 minutes. That’s the same as watching half an hour of TV. So, if you are smoking while you watch TV you might as well gather the family around now, coz you ain’t got long to go and you’ll be lucky to make it to the end of this season’s ‘Dancing With The Stars’

We all can make choices about how we live our lives. And with hundreds of TV channels and On Demand and Apple TV we clearly have a dizzying array of choices of what to watch. I guess the only question now is would we rather watch life on TV or live it ourselves.

Remember that old song “The Way We Were” – and I apologize in advance if this is now going to embed the tune in your brain for the rest of the day – where the lyrics talk about how in the past “the grass was greener, the smiles were brighter.” Well, you can add another item to that list. In the past people were thinner. A lot thinner.

That struck me the other day when Shirley was showing me some old stories that she produced many years ago. One was from 1989 (she was 12 at the time) shortly after the Loma Prieta earthquake hit San Francisco and it was a look at how many  people responded in heroic fashion after the quake. It was quite inspiring.

Feast for the eyes!

It was also quite eye opening. Looking at the tape, and the various shots taken in the immediate aftermath of the quake, one thing struck me. How thin everyone was. Not just those on camera, the reporters and anchors – they’re universally slim – but everyone. Almost without exception people were slim. Even those with a little extra girth were nothing compared to what you would find on the streets of most American cities, including San Francisco, today.

You can see the same thing in any movie or TV show from the 1970′s and 1980′s. Everyone was thin, really thin – not to mention that they had embarrassing hair cuts and really what were they thinking with those shoulder pads and jacket sleeves rolled up! – at least compared to people today.

Living high on the hog

It got me wondering, what on earth happened? Did each individual in the Bay Area suddenly decide that having survived a major earthquake they were now going to enjoy every minute of life as if it were their last and go on an eating/drinking binge? That’s one possibility I suppose.

Or maybe there is something else going on here. Maybe our lifestyles have changed in subtle but significant ways since then. Perhaps the sheer availability and cheapness of so many fast foods and heavily processed foods have simply caught up with us.  Years of eating junk food and working at jobs that require us to sit down all day, and that are further and further away from home so we have to spend hours in the car or the bus or the train just to get there – perhaps these have steadily padded out our waist lines till more than 60 percent of Americans are now overweight – millions of them morbidly so.

Looking at the video was a reminder of our past. Looking out the window I can see our future. And it doesn’t look pretty.

You’ve got to love a man who writes books about the Tour de France, King Arthur, horse racing and the fabulously titled tome “The Elderly Writer’s Guide to Indifferent Young Women’.

The gent in question is Graeme Fife, an English writer, essayist, poet, broadcaster and obviously a lover of sports and women – even if the feelings are not always returned.

Graeme Fife knows pain

I came across him recently in a cafe in San Francisco. Not him in the flesh you understand, but his words, his spirit. Appropriately enough we had popped in for a coffee and to watch the latest round of the Tour de France. High on the wall, above the massive video screens was the following quote:

“The greatest battle is not physical but psychological. The demons telling us to give up when we push ourselves to the limit can never be silenced for good. They must always be answered by the quiet, the steady dignity that simply refuses to give in. Courage. We all suffer. Keep going”

It was one of the simplest, yet most eloquent expression of the struggle we all face in trying to quieten the voices inside our head that tell us we’re not good enough, not smart enough, not strong enough, not worthy enough. Those voices may pop up  in a race up and down the mountains of southern France, or a tennis match with an old friend, or just in every day life, but one way or another we’re all victims of them.

I found the words wonderful because they are a reminder that just as we are struggling to get through, to succeed, or sometimes simply just to hold on, others are going through exactly the same thing. The doubts and uncertainties, the crises of confidence or faith, the insecurities that we are feeling, are felt by millions of others all around the world.

We none of us are free of these demons. Sometimes they win, beating us into submission. Sometimes we win. And it’s those triumphs, however few and far between, that ultimately keep us pushing forward.

Dreams don’t come cheap. Success doesn’t come easily, or last. It’s a daily struggle. A lifelong battle. And it’s only at the end that we can see if we have held true to ourselves, to our hopes, and tried our best.

We may not have won, but in fighting, in trying, in persevering we have found something even greater than an occasional victory. We have found ourselves.