Pop Philosophy

The Power of Perpendicular Thinking

Do you know why we have a 40 hour work week? The answer might shock you. Its origins date to the Industrial Revolution (not the Internet Revolution - the industrial one). Back in the middle of the 18th century, it was common for people to work 10 to 12 hours, 6 days a week. After almost a century of effort by organized labor to coalesce around a common, acceptable work standard, the US Congress ultimately passed the Fair Labor Act of 1938 and formalized our current work week. 

 

Tim Ferriss famously upended this concept with his book and 'lifestyle design' manifesto, The Four Hour Work Week. In it, he pointed out how anachronistic this concept of 'work' was in light of our contemporary, always-connected knowledge economy. He went further, remarking that all of the 'common sense rules' of the real world are actually "a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions." But he must have been exaggerating, right? Surely this was an example of argument-by-anecdote, and that most - if not almost all - of what we're told, taught or too terrified to question is really true ... isn't it? Let me answer that question with another question ...

Have you ever wondered why we take summer vacations? Because we needed our kids to help plough corn fields. 

The practice is an outdated legacy of the agrarian economy. Summer vacations were not originally 'vacations' at all. They were meant to allow farmers' children (a critical part of the work force at the time) to pitch in during harvest season. Small family farming began to recede in the 19th century - around the time the Industrial Revolution began, and the 40 hour work week took hold - and yet we continue to live with the legacy of both a decade into the 21st century.

This isn't just a quaint custom that we've preserved past its' sell-by date, either. As Time Magazine pointed out in a cover story this past August, The Case Against Summer Vacation: 

"when American students are competing with children around the world, who are in many cases spending 4 weeks longer in school a year, larking through summer is a luxury we can't afford. What's more, for many children - especially children of low-income families - summer is a season of boredom, inactivity and isolation ... Dull summers take a steep toll, as researchers have been documenting for more than a century. Deprived of healthy stimulation, millions of low-income kids lose a significant amount of what they learn during the school year."

 

 

It's called the 'summer slide', and its most pernicious impact is that the problem it creates compounds year after year. By ninth grade, "summer learning loss could be blamed for two-thirds of the achievement gap separating income groups." Whereas the 40 hour week is merely an inconvenience foisted on an unsuspecting workforce, the unintended consequences of summer vacation are bad at best, and a key driver of social inequality at worst. 

Noticing a pattern here? The institutions that form the heart of of our day to day existence - working 9 to 5, weekends off, summer vacations - are actually throwbacks to other times, anachronisms from other centuries. What we regard as the benign realities of life are actually harmful, outdated societal habits. 

You might be tempted to dismiss this as cantankerous post-modernism, but people have been warning us about this for some time now. A century and half ago, Oscar Wilde pithily summed up what could be the proto-philosophy behind this thinking when he dryly pointed out that "everything popular is wrong."  From across the Atlantic, his contemporary Mark Twain added, as if he were nodding in assent: "When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." 

The 40 hour work week and the summer vacation are examples of what some people call the 'QWERTY Effect' (named after the curious reason why most Anglo-saxon keyboards have letters that spell out Q-W-E-R-T-Y in the upper left-hand corner). In the era when people wrote on typewriters with keys (look at the picture below to see what they look like, digital natives!), the mechanics of the earliest machines were very delicate.  In fact, the main design challenge was to prevent users from typing too quickly and jamming the type-bars together. In 1873, Christopher Latham Sholes managed to slow down the speed at which people could type by laying out the keys in one of the least efficient ways possible, and the QWERTY layout was born. Fast forward almost 150 years, and the keyboard on which I'm typing (should I write 'keying'?) this post on still maintains the QWERTY layout (even though there's no type-bar or ribbon to be found anywhere).

The QWERTY keyboard has become a metaphor for practices that persist well past their point of relevance, and for the power of high switching costs (an economic term quantifying the resistance to change) in preserving outmoded but deeply ingrained activities. When I realized that so many aspects of my life - from how I work to how I type - were based on old habits, I began to wonder what else we've been conditioned to accept as 'fact' without critically assessing it first. It was then that I discovered the power of what I've come to call 'Perpendicular Thinking'.

In geometry, a perpendicular line is one that meets another at a perfect, 90 degree right angle. Aside from the association with the word 'right' (as in correct, not conservative!), I describe the approach this way because we need to develop the reflex of coming at any commonly-held practice from an angle - and preferably one of professional scepticism.

Let me be clear: I'm not advocating blind, contrarian opposition. Indeed, this would be as short-sighted as taking what's given to us as a given. Instead, I believe that we owe to ourselves to question what we're told, investigate if it's still true, and make a personal, conscious determination about whether or not we choose to embrace or reject it.

Perpendicular Thinking is not about adopting conspiracy theories, either. I don't believe that we are being misled by unseen Masters of the Universe. Rather, this is more likely a convergence of two intellectual sins: sloth and inertia. We are too lazy to question what we are told, and too hidebound by tradition to change the way we've always done things. But while there is no secret 'star chamber' pulling society's strings, we are still being negligent if we don't examine what we're being sold. We owe it to ourselves to question conventional wisdom; and once you do so, one can't help but realize that we're surrounded by 'truths' that are not actually true. Let's look at just 3 examples of modern myths: you must buy, not rent; the secret to success is to work harder; and it is possible to do two things at once (well).

1) Renting v. Owning

Consider the axiom that you should own property. For generations, people were taught that owning one's home was the epitome of the American Dream. This irrationally exuberant (to borrow Alan Greenspan's colourful phrase) idea spread elsewhere - as far away as Iceland and Ireland, we learned later - and a worldwide property bubble ensued. The Great Recession of 2008 brought real estate values crashing down, and with it the now clearly foolish idea that everyone should strive to have their own suburban McMansions. 

But we should have realized this sooner; as early as 2005, The Economist had written an editorial (a leader, in their parlance) arguing that, even in the midst of the boom, renting was a more sensible option for most people. The reasons were simple: a renter got more house for their money, and they had the flexibility to deal with changing economic circumstances and job opportunities by being mobile (a fact that would prove critical after many lost their jobs 3 years later). The argument, while cogent and compelling, ran counter to the prevailing 'wisdom' of the moment, and few followed The Economist's sage advice. Five years on, another magazine, Time (a consistently contrarian weekly, it seems) ran a different cover story entitled: "Rethinking Homeownership: Why owning a home may no longer make economic sense." If only we had been paying attention ....

2) Less is More

In 1906, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto discovered a fascinating 'power law' of life: that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. The Pareto Principle, or the 80 | 20 Rule, as it's more commonly known, has proved to apply to everything from profits (80% of a company's profits come from 20% of its' customers) to personal style (20% of your clothes will be worn 80% of the time) . Richard Koch even wrote an entire book on the idea, methodically enumerating the dozens of applications - and implications - of this concept.

What makes this a particularly 'perpendicular' idea is its counterintuitive message that less is indeed more. In an era where people foolishly boast about 80 hour work weeks (forget 4 hour ones!), the underlying message is that we ought to live to work. The power of the Pareto Principle lies in the revelation that we need to work smarter, not harder, in order to succeed. Applying the 80 | 20 Rule to all aspects of your life will revolutionize the way you approach problems, even as it reverses one of our society's central scripts.

3) The Multitasking Myth

Modern life has left us with many misconceptions, perhaps the most pernicious being the conceit that we can do many things at once. This stems from our increasingly symbiotic relationship with computers, and the tendency to converge their functionality with ours. As their processing power increased year after year, computers gained the ability to run multiple programs concurrently. However, while our machines were getting more powerful, our minds were not. Humans, alas, don't benefit from regular hardware upgrades. Nevertheless, we have come to believe that we can operate as efficiently as our devices do, and the result is the myth of multitasking.

Don't let its' benign moniker fool you: multitasking is to the millennial generation what marijuana was to the sixties generation. It is the defining - and destructive - opiate of its time, and it is responsible for far more than some jumbled e-mails or errors on an excel spreadsheet. First, while we believe that we are getting more done in less time by balancing three things at once, research tells another story. Studies demonstrate that when we are 'multitasking', we aren't actually performing each activity concurrently (as PCs do) but rather toggling from task to task. Each attention change brings switching costs (there's that word again), which ultimately means that it take more time to do multiple things simultaneously than it would to do them sequentially (one after the other). In other words, multitasking is not more efficient than single-tasking; the activities take longer and, unsurprisingly, are more prone to error.

 

It gets worse. Multitasking is actually a life-threatening habit :texting while driving is more dangerous than drunk drinking (Studies reveal that a person who is texting while driving at the speed of 35 mph will cover 25 ft before bringing the car to complete halt as compared to a distance of 4 ft which a drunk driver would cover at the same speed). 

Finally, multitasking is even adversely rewiring our minds. Don't believe me? Read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and you'll be more frightened by reality than you were by 'Paranormal Activity 2'. Carr's book is a cri de coeur on how technology is transforming us - for the worse. We are losing our ability to concentrate and luxuriate in deep reading, opting instead for what Tim Ferriss calls the cocaine pellet dispenser of digital distractions. We contemplate much less; we skim and scan more. Worst of all, our brains are being scrambled by the very practices that we adopt to keep up with the frenetic pace of modern life. Multitasking is yet another big lie we tell ourselves, but - much like the 'summer slide' - the consequences are compounding in our minds every day.

 

Perpendicular Thinking is part of my personal Pop Philosophy

Perhaps now you understand why it's so important to 'be perpendicular'? I have definitely tried to embrace this philosophical approach. In fact, looking back on my life so far, I've noticed that I've often followed - for better and for worse - my own north star in both actions and thoughts. Indeed, I was perpendicular before I discovered perpendicularity.

I left Montreal right after graduating university to pursue an adventure in politics in Washington, DC - as the only Canadian on Capitol Hill, no less - at a time when most of my friends were still clinging to the safe harbour of home. Then, 6 years into a reasonably successful career as a Congressional Press Secretary, I pivoted out of politics and into business school - but in London, England for good measure. I spent the next decade in media and telecommunications, half in Europe and half in North America, before making my latest transition into consulting, speaking and writing. My career path has not been haphazard, but it certainly hasn't followed the linear direction that some of my friends' trajectories have - either in geography or in profession - either. The road I've taken has had its fair share of right angle turns along the way.

 

 

In my intellectual journey, I've followed a similar path. Many of the ideas that have caught my eye or sprung from my imagination share the common gene of contrarian thinking. I've written about being alone together, the sex appeal of single moms, the significance of exits over entrances, the 'return' of history and the importance of making magnificent mistakes. Even the raison d'étre of this blog - to think seriously about not-so-serious things - is a manifestation of my penchant for perpendicularity.

Along the way, I've taken inspiration from a number of my friends who have had the courage to walk alone in one form or another. I think of my mate Hendo, who stepped away from a lucrative career trading derivatives to work for the World Wildlife Fund, or Ben, who started a new media company at a stage in life - just married, bambino on the way - when others are normally looking to join an established enterprise. I remember a pivotal talk with my great friend Mike Rodman, who told me that, after careful deliberation, he and his wife had decided that they weren't going to have children. It struck me that this was the first time that anyone in my circle had taken the other side of the parenthood argument. Mike's thoughtful, sincere and coherent position for not having kids was the first instance that a friend openly spoke of the 'heretical' idea of choosing not to found a family. I respect his decision, but I admire him even more for having the confidence to think on his own, and the courage to take the road less travelled.

 

 

Perpendicular thinking is not just useful as a philosophy of life, however. It can also be a sound business strategy. Henry Ford was fond of saying that if he had just listened to his customers, he would have produced a better horse and buggy. Ford realized that if you waited around for someone to ask for your product, you might be too late. Jeff Bezos understood this when he built Amazon in an age when bricks and mortars bookstores - and businesses - were the way people overwhelmingly shopped.  

Legendary investor Warren Buffett thinks much the same way. He points out that "to make big money in the investment world, you have to learn to think independently; to think independently, you need to be comfortable standing alone. I buy stocks when the lemmings are headed the other way." Buffett walks the walk, too: he bought into Berkshire Hathaway when no one wanted it; he bought into American Express when no one wanted it; he bought into the Washington Post Company when no one wanted it; and most recently, at the bottom of the recent Great Recession, he bought into Goldman Sachs when no one wanted it. He knows the time to buy a stock is when everyone else is selling it - not when everyone else is buying it.

Steve Jobs is cut from the same cloth. He looked at a music industry ravaged by piracy and not yet awash in MP3 players, married an easy, affordable (and oh by the way legal) digital music delivery system (iTunes) to an elegant, eminently portable and oh-so-cool device (iPod) and changed the game forever. As one of his ads famously advocated, Steve Jobs thought differently.

Henry Ford, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs all proved what business writer Alan Webber once noted: "Counterintuitive can be a great economic model." He should know, too: he went from being editor of the Harvard Business Review to reinventing the business magazine when he launched Fast Company in 1995. These men all parlayed perpendicular thinking into profits, but to reduce this to a novel commercial approach would be missing the point. We owe it ourselves to follow their lead, but also Mark Twain's and my friend Mike Rodman's as well. We need to become more comfortable about going against the grain.

 

 

Living a Perpendicular Life

 So what does this all mean for you? How can you adopt these principles and live a perpendicular life?

Too many of us are afraid to be ourselves, so we follow the crowd off the cliff. Robert F. Kennedy once observed: "There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?" I'm not usually one to disagree with a Kennedy, but I take issue with the predicate: not enough people go through life really asking 'why', in my opinion. That is at the heart of perpendicular thinking - to come at conventional wisdom obliquely, from an angle, and develop the habit of asking why, or why not? So let me leave you with some suggestions: 

Don't subcontract critical thinking to society. More often than not, conventional wisdom is more reliant on convention than sagacity.

Be consistently counterintuitive. Always stop and think when someone says that you're 'supposed' to do something. Are you buying a house because you really want to own, or because you've been told that it's what responsible, smart people do?

Flip the script. Learn from children (as Adora Svitak's delightful TED Talk wisely counsels). Make your mistakes magnificent, by focusing on understanding your own failures rather than trying to reverse-engineer others successes. Plan your exits as carefully as you do your entrances.

Be an innovator rather than a follower. It worked for Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs; what could it do for you?

Contemplate - perhaps even take - the road less travelled. It may turn out that you're the only one who knows what they're doing.

Be uncommon. Always try to be in a 'Category of One' in business and in life. A noted businessman and philosopher once said, "you want to be considered the only ones who do what you do." His name: Jerry Garcia. His achievement: turning The Grateful Dead into the most successful touring band of all-time.

Dare to be 'un' popular, in the Wildean sense of the term. Don't worry about what others are doing; worry about whether you're doing the right thing.

 

 

Finally, adopt the 'X-Files' approach to life: Trust no one and nothing. I wonder what QWERTY practices are you tolerating in your life? Find out. 

If you start to ask questions like this, you will be amazed by some of the answers. Make them part of your life philosophy, and tap into the power of perpendicular thinking. But don't just take my word for it ...

 

Forget the Economy - the Fundamentals of our Society are not strong

The financial crisis of the past few weeks has completely changed my life. 

The clang of the 4 pm NYSE Closing Bell is now as familiar to me as the theme to Hockey Night in Canada.  I follow the (rare) ups and (sadly regular) downs of the Dow like some of my friends fret over their Fantasy football stats. I watch CNBC like I used to watch ESPN (Dylan Ratigan is the new Tony Reali, and I have a major crush on Erin 'easy on the eyes' Burnett).

That's the fun part. More ominously, these past few weeks seem to have aged me in a policy sense. At the risk of sounding like John McCain (for the record, I have already voted absentee for Obama, would like to think I'm not that old, but I am cranky), I've come to believe that our society, and not just the economy, is in crisis. As bad as the financial situation is, it appears to be the symptom of a more serious disease: a cancerous consumerism, fueled by the steroid of cheap credit, coursing through the bloodstream of contemporary North American society.

If we stop for a second and look beyond the finger-pointing regarding the current housing bubble | mortgage backed securities | banking | credit crisis, there's a deeper cause for concern here. While the above heavily contributed to the sad state in which the economy finds itself now, the groundwork for this debacle, I believe, was laid decades ago in the steady erosion of sound fiscal but also personal values.

The decoupling of the previously twinned notions of 'work' and 'money'

Too many people have gotten the notion that 'money' and 'work' are only remotely (and not causally) related.  Many factors contributed to this impression over the years, from technological as well as behavioral changes. 

It used to be that employers handed out or, at minimum, mailed pay checks every two weeks. Not any more: today, we receive electronic wire transfers and the money magically appears in our accounts. This simple change has blurred the bond between work and pay; rather than linking units of labor with units of currency, there now seems to be a degree of distinction between the two.

Money also comes out of a hole in the wall nowadays, but it might as well be falling from the proverbial tree; I'm speaking, of course, of the ATM. Yet it has essentially the same effect of abstracting the provenance of money, and thereby attenuating its' intrinsic value. Moreover, cash is no longer king and practically no longer current. In North America and even more so in Europe, we are methodically moving towards a cash-less society. Everything, it seems, can be paid by credit or debit cards today. I know people who don't carry cash at all now that many taxis in NYC and London take cards as well. Finally, the emergence, then expansion of e-commerce and online shopping (a vice that my girlfriend just discovered, much to my dismay) has, for its part, further removed the physicality and proportionality of spending money. Whether you're buying a book or a round trip ticket to Bali, the experience is identical and equally ethereal. Spending money is now a virtual experience, mediated by technology and frictionless transactions (more on this later). The net effect of all this is the decoupling of the previously twinned notions of work and money, but also between cash and consumption. Today, it's possible to spend money without thinking of work, and to consume without spending cash. These may seem like insignificant psychological changes, but I suspect that they've had a lasting effect on how we actually behave as economic actors.

The loss of commonsense values in the living room and the board room

The change in consumer psychology and behavior is not the only critical factor worth noting. North Americans seem also to have loss their common sense. If you'll bear with me while I perform a quick ratio analysis of key economic indicators, you'll quickly see what I mean.

In 1975, the median American annual salary was $11,800 ($39,302 in real, or today's, dollars as adjusted for inflation) while the average house price was $38,940 ($132,000 in real dollars). This meant that the income to cost ratio of home ownership was 1 | 3.3. In other words, the typical house cost the average (one-wage earning) family 3.3 times their annual salary.

Today, salaries have risen slightly to $48,201(a 23% increase from 1975), but median house prices have more than quadrupled to $275,000 in 2006 (real dollars again). The ratio is now 1 | 5.7, almost twice the size as it was only thirty years earlier. While we should factor in that today many households have two incomes to put towards buying a house (because increasingly both parents work), it's also clear that families these days need two paychecks to make these particular ends meet.

What do these statistics tell us? That in three short decades, wages grew anemically while housing prices grew astronomically. This is evidence of a bubble, certainly; however, it also points to the fact that most home buyers never looked critically at the market 'value' of their properties and questioned whether the seemingly inexorable rise in prices was sustainable. It clearly was not, as we started learning in the second half of 2006, when housing prices in the US started to taper. Many, if not most people, looked the other way because they were among those getting richer as their homes (the main asset in most households) rose in value. This may explain the behavior, but it does not excuse their collective irrational exuberance (to use Alan Greenspan's infamous phrase); this was a clear failure of common sense.

We probably don't need another example, but let's investigate one more metric anyway - namely the hotly-discussed topic of CEO compensation. How did it become acceptable to regular folks that the average chief executive was paid $10,982,000 a year in 2005, while the typical employee that year took home $41,861?

The following statistic, from an article last month in the New York Times, further crystallizes the point: "In 2007, the total compensation of chief executives in large American corporations was 275 times that of the salary of the average worker, the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization, estimates. In the late 1970s, chief executive pay was 35 times that of the average American worker." 

Clearly, the pay scales swung completely out of balance in those three decades. On its' own, this would be a shocking development. Taken with the inflation in house values, however, we see that people simply took leave of their senses through much of the last 30 years. On the way to CEOs getting ridiculously rich and the middle class buying their McMansions, no one stopped to think whether this era of unprecedented economic expansion was built on strong fundamentals. Sadly but perhaps not surprisingly, the bill for this spending spree came due this September with the current crisis.

The Instant Gratification Generation and the twin ills of e-commerce and easy credit

So North Americans collectively took a vacation from economic history and assumed that markets would continuously rise. This isn't the first time it's happened, nor probably will it be the last. But there's an even deeper rot in our society, one that worsened the impact of our greed and stupidity. The simple values of earning money and delaying gratification have been eroded today. The US has the lowest savings rate in the Western world. The idea of 'saving for a rainy day' is a quaint anachronism. Why save and shop tomorrow when you can borrow and buy today? We live in an economy that depends on, if not demands, a consumer culture based on spending someone else's money.

On a macro-economic level, the system requires easy credit and care-free consumerism to thrive. The entire US economy has been propped up for years by the unfailing willingness of its citizens to consume like there were no consequences. In order to facilitate this, the Fed has maintained what were, in retrospect, almost criminally low interest rates. This ensured that everyone had access to cheap credit. 

On a commercial level, technology and industry cooperated to create a near-frictionless purchasing environment. Go to a big box electronics store and you'll be bombarded with offers to buys TVs "no money down, and no interest until 2010". Back in the day when people shopped by catalog, you paid right away and received the desired good later. That script has been flipped. There are literally no road blocks, let alone speed bumps, to buying any more: merchants allow you to take home today but pay tomorrow - and when "tomorrow" is not next month but next year, it seems even more distant.

Then there is the credit card. Its' very existence makes consuming an abstract, almost effortless exercise. Buy now and get the bill 30 days later. Purchase and cost are almost completed decoupled. When you swipe your card, it doesn't even seem real - as if it's happening in a video game as opposed to real life. Reality may intrude later, when you receive your bill. But even then many people pay their bills online, so the payment process is equally mediated. You've been sucked in to the money Matrix.

Here's a thought experiment:  the next time you buy a big ticket item - say a TV or an expensive purse - imagine purchasing it instead by withdrawing the cash rather than slapping down the card. In theory - and in pure economic terms - the two acts should be indistinguishable, because money is fungible. It makes no difference to the merchant what form it comes in (pace the credit card transaction cost, of course). But it makes a HUGE difference to the consumer. Would you feel as comfortable with the purchase if you watched the clerk count out the twenties in front of you while you waited?

Ubiquitous credit has almost certainly corroded our values. But that's not the only economic evil that tempts us today. We now have to contend with the malevolent effects of e-commerce in addition to easy credit. Have you ever shopped on Amazon? The exercise of browsing and buying is so streamlined that you're almost surprised to see something turn up at your door in a few days. Don't know what to buy? Check your wish list. Not sure you'll like it? Be persuaded by the reviews. Ready to check out? Not until you've been flashed recommendations for further shopping by Amazon's supersmart algorithms. All set to push the button? That's all you have to do, with their patented one-click purchasing system.

Easy buying doesn't just exist online, though that's probably where we find the the frictionless shopping experience in its' highest art form. Brick and mortar shopping is pretty damn easy, too. Have you been to McDonalds lately? "I'll have a Number 3 combo, please." How about ordering at Applebee's, or Montana's? You don't even need to read: just point to the photo in the menu and you're all set. At Starbucks, you don't actually require cash or credit: your own coffee debit card will do.

Getting the picture? The net effect is that it has become too easy to buy. But that's the point, isn't it? Merchants and Madison Avenue have colluded, if not conspired, to make it oh-so-simple for us to spend. And therein lies a major part of the problem. Unfortunately, it's only half of it.

We don't produce anything anymore: the modern economy is based exclusively on consumers spending borrowed money

I've tried to demonstrate how the demand side of our economy has lost much of the common sense that used to characterize consumers just a generation ago. But the blame doesn't all belong on that side of the ledger. The supply side of the economic system has become equally dysfunctional. Over the past two decades, the drivers of the North American economy have not been better products but increasingly bigger bubbles: first the tech and telecoms magic carpet ride in the 1990s and, more recently, the housing one that just burst last year.

Instead of leading the world in producing cars (GM was passed by Toyota this year as the globe's number one automaker, and is rumored to be perilously close to bankruptcy), the US' most recent contribution to the world economy has been the quiver of complex financial instruments that Wall Street used to create ostensibly 'risk-free' leverage. These tools - from securitized debt vehicles to credit default swaps - are so arcane that the supposedly brilliant heads of these financial services companies could not even comprehend them.

They were created by the so-called Numerati. It sounds like a term borrowed from The Da Vinci Code, but actually they are the mathematical modelers who washed over Wall Street in recent years and gave rise to this financial engineering. The resulting products were positioned to be perfectly hedged against downside risk, but no one knew for sure. The CEOs who invested billions in them were either not smart enough to realize the actual risks, or more likely making too much money to worry about it. Their greed - and stupidity - put the financial system in unnecessary peril with what amounted to completely unregulated but legalized gambling. As incredible as it now seems, banks were allowed to make and take bets that bookies in Vegas would balk at.

These so-called derivatives were not the only big wagers these institutions made, sadly. Too many banks lent money to people who had no business borrowing. The 'sub-prime mortgage' is a very anodyne way of describing the phenomenon of banks and other lending institutions (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) loaning money to borrowers who fall outside the normal pool because of their poor credit history or insufficient income and collateral. This can work - for a time - when house values only go up, as the banks holding the 'paper' on these homes have a lien against an asset whose worth is rising. Even if the borrower can't make the mortgage, the bank has made money, theoretically. But like any financial scheme, there are risks. The house of cards came down as soon as people started massively defaulting on their mortgage payments, forcing a record number of foreclosures and, in effect, triggering a margin call on banks that they were increasingly unable to make.

Everyone owns their share of the blame

Yes, lenders were stupid and greedy. But they are not the only ones that deserve criticism and blame. We are guilty, too. We forgot the basic principles of both home economics and macro economics - that we shouldn't spend money we don't have and that markets that go up at some point will go down. Too many people bought too much house for their budgets. In the past decade we gave rise to a new term - House Porn - and a whole new genre of TV programming - the extreme home makeover. Too many people - especially in the US - used their houses like piggy banks, tapping the rising equity in their homes to re-finance their mortgages and borrow more to spend more. Just as many institutions took on too much risk - a process called gearing, or creating financial leverage - so too did individuals. 

Yet even these two groups weren't alone in all of this - Government allowed itself to get overleveraged as well. During 8 years of supposedly fiscally conservative Republican rule, the US spent far more than it earned. As a result, from the budget surpluses of the Clinton years 2009 will see the annual budget deficit rise to a staggering $750 Billion (6% of GDP). But this merely confirms that the rot runs deep, and that the fundamental lack of common sense and values corroded every element of our society. 

So what have we learned? The current financial crisis has its' roots, I firmly believe, in a series of lapses in the moral fiber and economic judgment of individuals and institutions alike. Wall Street didn't screw Main Street, because both own their fair share of the blame. Banks were greedy and reckless in racking up astronomical profits at enormous risk, but home buyers were equally foolish in raiding their real estate equity and refinancing at every occasion. Right now we need to contain this crisis, but we can't stop there. Our society - and everyone in it - needs to make some serious course corrections. Until we realize the importance of restoring the personal and professional principles that underpin our financial system, 'fixing' the economy's fundamentals will serve no purpose.

People have to learn to save again. We can't continue to spend someone else's money. Purchase and price, and for that matter labor and money, must get reconnected in our minds if not in our monthly budgeting. Let's get back to delaying gratification, and the proposition that putting off consumption today will give me more pleasure tomorrow.

Banks need to make smarter bets. They can't continue to lend out fifty dollars for every one they have in their coffers. They've got to get back to saying 'no' again - to borrowers who don't fit the bill, to wizards who want to sell them 'risk-less' instruments, to greedy executives who get golden parachutes after  crashing their companies into the ground.

Finally, governments must be the grown-ups again. They need to regulate rogue financial markets and rein in profligate profiteering, excessive executive compensation and reckless risk-taking. They've got to get back to living within their means, too, and restore the principle that budget deficits are acceptable only in times of national peril.

At the risk of sounding like John McCain, the fundamentals of our society are not strong, my friends. The formula for fixing the current financial crisis may not be obvious, but curing the cancer ailing our broader community is simple: a return to common values and common sense.

The Importance of Planning Exits rather than Entrances: Ending with the Beginning in Mind

I came across a thought-provoking Moet & Chandon advertisement recently (shocking, I know) where two impossibly glamourous young model-types are pictured leaving a limousine with a magnum of the eponymous champagne. The tag line reads: Turn an Exit into an Entrance. Be Fabulous.* 

It was the first time that I came across a perfect summation of the counter-intuitive philosophy that I've proselytized for years, namely that exits are often more important than entrances. 

Let me explain. People frequently go to great lengths to plan their entrances, but they almost never give thought to their exits. Perhaps this is driven by the belief that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, as the saying goes. But what we often forget is that you never get a second chance to make a final impression, either. 

What makes the latter in some ways more critical than the former is that we are usually given opportunities, over time, to reinforce or - if need be - reverse the impact of an entrance. We are not afforded that luxury with our exits, however. Our last act is, in fact, the last word. 

I've been thinking a lot lately about endings. Perhaps it's because I experienced the passing of a loved one recently, and the reality of her being gone is still being absorbed. As someone put it well, I will never get over her departure, but I will start to get used to it. While she didn't get to completely stage manage her exit, she clearly had put a great deal of thought into the way she wanted to leave, as well as what she left behind. She understood that those final acts would serve as her adieu, and that those statements, both verbal and symbolic, would echo beyond her earthly lifetime. 

Unfortunately, many of us fail to have that foresight. Most of us forget the importance of the final frame. We focus almost exclusively on the opening credits in the scenes of life. The primacy of entrances over exits is a long-standing component of conventional wisdom, even if it is fundamentally ill-conceived. 

Nearly every aspect of public and private life, both past and present, reinforces this notion. In the political square, for example, elected officials have 'advance' people who arrive well before they do to map out, in meticulous detail, every aspect of their entrances. Presidents give Inaugural addresses every four years but rarely, if ever, make as much-ballyhooed farewell speeches. In the run-up to next year's presidential elections, we've been treated to a meticulously staged-managed declaration of candidacy by Barack Obama, but I doubt that we'll see a similar spectacle if he drops out of contention. 

History offers many of the same examples of this error. General Dwight David Eisenhower spent almost 3 years devising the amphibious D-Day invasion in Normandy - the opening of the Western front in World War II - but it fell to General George Marshall to cobble together his plan for the reconstruction of Europe in a few short months. Closer to today, US military commanders carefully choreographed the commencement of combat operations (the 'Shock and Awe' phase) in the recent Iraq war but failed to formulate so much as an outline of a strategy for the occupation afterwards. 

On a more personal level, people succumb to this same strategic misstep frequently as well. We fret over first dates but end entire relationships with something as desultory as a text message. We prepare fastidiously for an interview and dress to impress on our first day at a new office, but we quit jobs on a whim and slink out of a company, hoping not to have to honor our two weeks' notice. In an unintended irony, we labor over and spend lavishly on weddings, our introductions to married life, but leave both the details and the debt of our funerals largely unarticulated and unaccounted for. 

Indeed, there is an instinctive and, some might say, intellectual bias towards beginnings. Even the great Aristotle wrote over two Millennia ago that "well begun is half done." At the same time, however, we all probably intuitively suspect how important exits are to forming that last - and lasting - impression. 

But do we realize just how much weight those final moments carry? Probably not. Cognitive psychology is crystal clear on the subject, however. One of the most influential books I ever read, The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, makes a powerful and impassioned argument about the 'tyranny' of too much choice. In building his very persuasive case, Dr. Schwartz introduces us to a psychological Power Law called the Peak | End Rule. First discovered by Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, the principle states that "what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended. This 'peak-end' rule is what we use to summarize the experience, and then we rely on that summary later to remind ourselves of how the experience felt." Simply put, our entire recollection of an event, a period of time, a relationship or even a person can come down, in large measure, to how we felt at the zenith or nadir of the experience and especially at its' conclusion. 

Would it were that this was the only psychological force at play in making endings matter. The more we learn about how we think, the more it becomes apparent that perception and memory are fickle and partially false constructs. "Memories - especially memories of experiences - are notoriously unreliable. Perceptions are portraits, not photographs,", as Daniel Gilbert put it in his recent best-seller, Stumbling on Happiness. In some ways, this should not surprise us. The faithful representation of all that we've seen and felt would take up terabytes of a 'human hard drive'. How, as Gilbert asks, "do we cram that vast universe into the relatively small storage compartment between our ears?" The answer is that "the elaborate tapestry of our experience is not stored in memory - at least not in its entirety. Rather, it is compressed for storage by first being reduced to a few critical threads ... or a small set of of key features. Later, when we want to remember our experience, our brains quick reweave the tapestry by fabricating - not by actually retrieving - the bulk of the information that we experience as a memory." 

What this means is that those 'snapshots' in our mind, the seemingly oh-so-vivid memories, should be more properly viewed as impressionist paintings rather than high-resolution photographs. What's more, as we have learned through the Peak | End Rule, exits shape and 'paint' those perceptions, and in turn they inform the interpretations that we mistake for memories. We "misremember the past", in effect, and exits have a direct influence on that process. 

Clearly, our emphasis on entrances is not serving our best interests. What can and should we do? Simple - we ought to put as much time and thought into our exits as we do our introductions. We should end with the beginning in mind. An exit is a passage, after all, from one state to another. We need to start by recognizing that every ending is actually an opening of sorts - the start of the period of time where memory and revisionism 'reweaves' the tapestry of events that just happened. Seen in this light, the end is really prologue to a perpetual epilogue, whereby the 'ending' we thought that we experienced is actually constantly being rewritten and reviewed. 

So how does one put this 'Exit-tential' philosophy into practice? First, you should focus on how you want the encounter you're ending to be remembered. I call this legacy thinking, and it should - to a greater or lesser extent - suffuse many aspects of your previously entrance-centered existence. When you prepare for your life's set pieces, ponder on how you can better dictate their perceived denouement. Approach each concluding stage - no matter how anodyne or seemingly small - the way presidents attack their final terms in office, obsessed with what historians will write of them. 

This probably all sounds highfalutin and hard to accomplish, but it's actually easier than you think. The next time you move on from a job, take the time to tie up all the loose ends and exit on a high note. When you terminate a relationship with a girlfriend, find the feelings to do it properly, respectfully and sensitively. As you leave a party, set aside a moment to say goodbye to everyone to whom you talked (and especially the hosts). 

To some, this might seem to be common decency and | or common sense. No argument from me there. However, these simple gestures are sadly infrequent in our increasingly ill-mannered world. Moreover, they represent small but significant steps towards a new level of thinking that factors in the epilogues to one's entrances. 

This approach can be applied at a very granular level. When you are leaving a place where you've just visited friends, give them a goodbye call from the airport before your flight boards and let them know how much you appreciated the time that you spent together. Try to close out cafe conversations with confidantes as you would write a conclusion to an essay, capturing key ideas and charting the date for the next chat. 

A lot of this must appear absurd, and on some level I can see why. However, we all recognize that when an event or experience is well-ended we appreciate the difference. When rock god Bono departs the stage after a live concert, he and U2 have fine-tuned their finales so well that they simultaneously satisfy their audience with at least one encore, while still leaving them wanting more. When Jerry Seinfeld concludes a comedy set, he does so as the words - and the raucous laughter - of his last great joke linger in the air. Jacqueline Kennedy understood this reality, even in her moment of maximum grief. She carefully choreographed her husband and assassinated president John F. Kennedy's state funeral, down to the last decisive detail of having the coffin, draped with the Stars and Stripes, laying on a gun carriage drawn by six grey horses while a black riderless horse pranced along behind. That iconic image, along with that of the slain leader's casket lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda, simultaneously served to give the country ceremonial closure while cementing JFK's Camelot legacy. Of course, Mrs. Kennedy was simply taking a page from ancient history and the Egyptians in particular, who perfected the glorious goodbye with their elaborate tombs and pyramids to honor their fallen pharaohs. 

These, then, are examples of graceful and well-considered exits. There are others. Some industries and disciplines incorporate this thinking into their orthodoxy. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists talk about having 'exit strategies' for their companies and investments. The language of theatre, too, has included the idea of 'exit, stage right' in its vernacular. Presidents, as well, are preoccupied by perpetuity and often engage in a flurry of activity towards the ends of their tenures in order to shape their legacies. 

As mere mortals, maybe we don't need to ponder our place in history. But we ought to turn a wider-angle lens on life, look beyond our natural bias towards beginnings and plan the postscripts to our experiences. We need to stumble through fewer emergency exits, and compose more carefully crafted epilogues. 

What makes an excellent exit, in my opinion? First, one must wrap up loose ends, putting a period at the end of the metaphorical sentence. Second, one should leave a lasting and positive impression, so that their lingering thought of you is ultimately a flattering but not fleeting one. Finally, a perfect postscript brings with it classy closure. Endings matter, and the sooner we realize this and respond accordingly the better off we'll be. 

Even ostensibly 'final' exits aren't really final, though (Funerals aren't the last time you find yourself thinking of someone, for instance). They are more properly viewed as transitions rather than finales. In some ways, every end is a beginning. It's the start of the period that follows the one you just concluded. Endings always seem to be followed by epilogues, which then serve as prologues themselves. Today, more than ever, everything seems to be cyclical, if not circular. 

This philosophical fatalism should not numb one to the importance of leaving a mark when you leave, though. Instead, it should embolden you to compose every conclusion with a coda, so that you don't leave up to chance the legacy you're about to create. If Stephen Covey made famous the mantra to "begin with the end in mind" as one of his sacrosanct Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I'd like to add (and perhaps memorialize) an eighth:"end with the beginning in mind". Keep an eye on your personal postscript. Practice legacy thinking, but start today. Don't just leave - depart. Don't just end - climax. Don't just stop - culminate. Conclude with a crescendo, not with a clunk. Take time to formulate your final impression. 

I'll leave you to ponder these provocative words from Mary, Queen of Scots, perhaps the original 'Exit Strategist', as they sum up rather succinctly my sentiments and put an elegant, if figurative, period on this peroration: "In my end is my beginning." The End. (or is it?)

The Magnificent Mistake

When I was doing my MBA a number of years ago, much of the curriculum centered around the infamous case study. In preparation for our career as management professionals, we studied essentially two types of stories: those of how small companies became big, and how big companies acted small in somehow nimbly sidestepping strategic pitfalls. 

I recall a few quite vividly. The Southwest Airlines success story was particularly memorable, as I was struck by certain anecdotes that reverberate in my mind to this day. CEO Herb Kelleher had seen the future of airline travel and zigged when everyone else zagged, it seemed. While large airlines were arrayed around hub and spoke routing systems, he flew point to point. While the flag carriers amassed impressive fleets filled with all types of aircraft, he flew only one. As the rest of the industry competed on perks and in-flight goodies, he stripped those out and focused like a laser on rapid turnaround and on-time departures for his flights (without food to clean up, it took less time to prepare the cabin for departure again). He even borrowed the operations expertise of Formula One pit crews to streamline his processes and shave critical minutes off the down-time planes spent on the ground. 

He didn't do this all just to be different. These moves were designed to strip away cost and increase efficiency. Point to point travel eliminated the problem of missed connections and the need to re-route passengers. Maintaining a fleet of the same aircraft meant that he only needed to train and equip his repair crews for one model of plane and keep an inventory of fewer parts (since they were interchangeable on every one of his planes). Finally, by adopting F1 efficiencies his airline achieved the shortest turnaround speed in the business, reducing lost time on the ground and increasing the amount of (revenue-generating) flights possible. Within a few years, Kelleher flipped the airline model on its' head and built the regional, low-cost flight category that is the most profitable segment of the market today. To wit, last year the market capitalization of a low-cost European carrier, Ryanair, was at one point higher than that of venerable British Airways. 

I remember thinking at the time that Southwest was a logical success to study, if not emulate, as many low-cost airlines have come to since (Ryanair, Easyjet and JetBlue, to name but three). I laughed privately at the idea of an analysis of TransWorld Airlines, the old TWA of our parents' generation. Wouldn't it have been fun to read instead about how that airline figuratively crashed and burned in the space of a few short years? But business school case studies are all about successes and what they can teach us, I quickly realized. Putative MBAs spend much of their first year reverse-engineering growth stories in the belief that they can identify the strategic tipping points for that particular corporation. In essence, we were taught to plumb those companies' trajectories in order to discover the power laws of superior business performance. 

It made sense at the time. Knowing what I know now, however, I've come to wish that we had analyzed the likes of TWA instead. We should have focused on failures rather than studied successes. I'm sure that this sounds a bit counter-intuitive, if not heretical, but hear me out. We have far more to learn from failure than we can glean from success. 

For one, successes are often either spontaneous or serendipitous. In contrast, failures are frequently systematic. How many times have you committed the same mistake? It's a particularly cruel tenet of the human condition that we tend to make the same errors over and over. Whether it's something as innocuous as that persistent penchant for going to the net in tennis behind a weak serve, or more ominous activities such as sabotaging your career with antagonistic behaviour at the office, most of us are guilty of repeating both big and small miscues. Those who don't learn from history, they say, are condemned to repeat it; the same can be said of mistakes. To avoid the Sissyphean fate of constantly rolling our personal boulder up a hill only to have it fall down the other side, we owe it to ourselves to identify and ultimately excise that error-prone behaviour. It's more important to analyze and deconstruct errors (in order to avoid them) than try to replicate 'random' successes. As Esther Dyson pithily puts it, "always make new mistakes." 

Another reason to focus on failure is that, in some senses, it's easier. It's very hard, if not impossible, to actually 'reverse-engineer' and reproduce winning performances, much as we'd like to. Failures, on the other hand, are simpler to understand. 

Finally, it's almost fatally limiting. Focusing solely on successes while ignoring failures is a bit like trying to be profitable while only looking at the revenue side of the balance sheet and ignoring costs; one is, in essence, only attacking half of the problem. 

My Dad and I have discussed this issue for many years. As he is in some ways the proto-Pop Philosopher (pun intended), it should come as no surprise that he actually devised a theory and taxonomy of errors (he also, apparently, has lots of time on his hands). His Grand Theory of Errors - to which I've come to subscribe - posits that people make bad decisions most of the time, and that by virtue of this error rate alone we should act vigilantly to avoid miscues. Moreover, he believes, as I do, that most of these mistakes are systematic, not spontaneous, and that there are essentially 4 broad types of errors: diagnostic (for example, a doctor diagnosing the wrong disease from a particular set of symptoms), prognostic (predicting the wrong outcome from an event), strategic (identifying the wrong course of action for a given problem), and executional (not implementing the right course of action). 

This analytical approach to errors is actually borne out by a more intuitive understanding of everyday life. It's clear that people make mistakes all of the time. Psychologist Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, points out in his book that "the average American moves more than six times, changes jobs more than ten times, and marries more than once, which suggests that most of us are making more than a few poor choices." 

We don't really need an author to tell us this is the case; all we have to do is look around our own private worlds to see the evidence. At home and at work, aren't we more commonly surrounded (and suffocated) by failure than inspired by success? Most marriages, sadly, end today in divorce. Over my professional career, I've learned as much, if not more, of what NOT to do than by witnessing positive role models of behaviour and excellence. Isn't that true of most of us? True greatness - in the corporate world as in life - is hard to come by, while mediocrity is rampant. Sadly, I've come into contact with many more execrable managers than excellent ones. As a result, I've tried to tap that far richer vein of flawed executives and the object counter-examples they provide. In life, many of the best lessons come not so much by emulating the rare air of excellence as by avoiding the regular, repeated and routine pattern of other people's errors. 

The concept of what I have come to call the Magnificent Mistake is neither new nor original. The Romans understood it when they wrote about a Felix Culpa, which in Latin means a happy error. Millennia later, the expression 'sometimes you win by losing' comes to mind as another plank in the philosophical view that miscues have a sometimes hidden worth. Even more recently, Harvard Business Review posted a podcast extolling the virtues of the 'deliberate mistake' (HBR IdeaCast 4, June 7 2006). Just a short while ago, the venerable New York Times ran an op-ed entitled "The Power of Negative Thinking". In it, guest columnist Atul Gawande extols the virtue of "looking for, and sometimes expecting, failure." He recounts how surgeons at the much-maligned Walter Reed Army Medical Center were able to lower the death rate for wounded soldiers from 25% in the first Persian Gulf War to less than 10% today. How did they accomplish that feat? Not by studying 'successful' trauma centers abroad and transplanting or reverse-engineering their processes. Instead, they "actively looked for failures and how to overcome them." As the author concludes, "negative thinking is unquestionably painful. It involves finding and exposing your inadequacies. That's an unhealthy way to be in large parts of your life; but in running schools or business, in planning war ... negative thinking may be exactly what we need."

Unwittingly, I have come to embrace the mantra of negative thinking. One of the axioms that I live by is the following: learn from your mistakes, then forget about them. Like a Quarterback who just threw an interception, you need to realize why you made the miscue but not obsess over it on the next series of downs. In order to extract excellence out of an error in such a way, however, you need to study it first. Don't shrink away from facing your failures; instead, embrace them as the incredibly valuable learning experiences that they are. Turn those miscues into magnificent mistakes. 

The next time you hear a success story, ignore it. Chances are that 'success' was more about chance than conscious choice; moreover, you are unlikely to be able to repeat the combination of moves that led to that fortuitous outcome. Rather, search out examples of massive, abject failures - either in real life or in your life - and try to deconstruct what went wrong and why. By uncovering the root causes of your errors, you can ensure that they won't likely be repeated. As you wean yourself off wrong decisions, you will actually edge ever closer to success - in a way that is more organic (as opposed to reverse-engineered), systematic (as opposed to spontaneous) and sustainable (as opposed to serendipitous). 

The perfect definition of the cynical German concept of Schadenfreude comes from de la Rochefoucauld: "it's not enough that I succeed; my friends must also fail." Let me take poetic license and paraphrase it to capture my overarching view on mistakes: it's not necessary for us to succeed, so much as it is critical to avoid failure. Maneuvering through life without making mistakes may actually lead to extraordinary success, and steering clear of errors - especially systematic, repeated and avoidable ones - seems to constitute more than half the battle towards that goal. 

At the very least, we all ought to aim to break the cycle of recidivism and never make the same mistake. If we can stand to look at our failings coldly and analytically in the face, though, we can only benefit from the opportunity to exorcise the one demon we actually have control over - our own errors. So forget success, and focus on failure; you'll ultimately be glad - and better off - that you did.

The 7 Milestones of Maturity

When did all my friends become adults? 

The question came to me the other day for no particular reason. Perhaps it was prompted by yet another (happy) announcement of a friend's new addition to the family, or the steak dinner with a mate in Manhattan two weeks ago where the conversation centered - as it mostly does these days - on couples, kids, and careers. Was it that long ago that our lives were consumed by markedly more adolescent activities, I wondered? Don't get me wrong. I don't miss the days when hooking up was more on our minds than, say, buckling up the kids in the back seat or optioning up our stake in the company. But when - exactly - did this cataclysmic change occur, and why didn't we throw a party to celebrate the momentous occasion? 

Perhaps because it didn't happen so much as it's still happening, one stage at a time. Adulthood, I've come to believe, is - like life - a journey not a destination. 

I used to think that the transition from adolescence to adulthood was accomplished through one seminal event - not unlike a metaphysical border crossing where one moment you're in one state and suddenly you're in the next. As I got older (notice that I didn't say 'old'), I came to realize that adulthood and adolescence are as much states of mind as they are concrete life stages. In both instances, the graduation from one to the other is more likely achieved in steps - milestones, if you will - that mark our development and maturation as individuals. 

Defining 'adulthood' is difficult, not to mention subjective. I'm reminded of the parable of a judge who, when asked to define 'evil', responded: "I don't know what it is, but I recognize it when I see it." Adulthood is not like evil, but it is equally mercurial to define yet intrinsically familiar to all. We won't necessarily all agree about what constitutes being an adult, but perhaps we can find consensus about what it takes to get there. In pondering this question (I may have too much time on my hands, I know), I humbly propose the following 7 Milestones of Maturity. 

(Why seven, you ask? Good question. For one, it felt right. For another, it sounded nice. Since Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effectively People, 7 has been the ultimate lucky number for lists, so who am I to mess with success? Seriously, I came up with seven because these seven spoke to me ... ) 

1) Monogamy The decision to be exclusive to a partner - especially for a male - is possibly the first concrete step an adolescent takes towards adulthood. For one, monogamy implies restriction and limitation of choice; the act of closing off possibilities is in and of itself a milestone of maturity. Selecting one person over another introduces you to the idea of opportunity costs - that every decision brings with it the realization that you have to give up something to have another. This is a hard but important lesson to children, heretofore accustomed to having their cake and eating it, too. What's more, monogamy also serves to reveal the significance of sacrifice - of postponing short-term pleasure today for greater benefits tomorrow. Finally, fidelity forces you to make a commitment to your partner, which is also a novel experience for most young people. Dedicating yourself to someone for an unspecified amount of time is, for many, their first exercise in trust, faith and future. In illustrating the concepts - and costs - of choice, sacrifice, and commitment, monogamy is a critical first gate to adult experiences. 

2) Mortgage If monogamy is about making a choice and committing to it, assuming a mortgage is all about taking on responsibility. Whether we fully realize it or not at the time, buying a property, and going into managed debt to do so, brings with it real world consequences. No longer are our lives - or more precisely, livelihoods - entirely our own. A bank owns a majority of our home, and holds a lean against all of our future earnings until we repay it back fully. Accepting and embracing this reality requires a measure of fiscal sanity and sobriety that is inconsistent with adolescence, where money conceivably grows on trees - or at least out of our parents' pockets. Moreover, a mortgage is a personal (as opposed to communal) commitment; this is not a burden one can share, absent a spouse. The responsibility of a mortgage serves to restrict - for many of us for the first time - the range of our possibilities. Life suddenly has limits, and a commitment made in such a way is not easily nor painlessly broken. While monogamy may have acquainted us with the concept of choices, mortgages present us with its' corollary - consequences. It is in realizing the ramifications of our decisions that we add an important measure of maturity, and take another step towards 'seniority'. 

3) Marriage The act of getting married is, for many, the ultimate rite of passage. Perhaps more than any other milestone on this list, it is almost universally recognized as the moment when a father's daughter leaves the nest for good, and a mother's son takes on the responsibility of matrimony and, ostensibly, lifelong commitment to another. If the long, steady road to adulthood is characterized by conscious acts that limit choice and increase responsibility (such as monogamy and mortgages), the selection of a life partner is certainly the most ominous instance when we are faced with the proposition: "choose one item from this list, and one item only, forever". One's selection of husband or wife is the single biggest decision one ever gets to make. Other determinations in life - such as choosing a certain college, or accepting a particular job - may in fact turn out to be the more influential inflection point in retrospect, after all is said and done. Our trajectories may be forever altered by a fateful decision to move to London on a whim, for example, as that choice may have the knock-on effect of placing you there when you meet your future wife, settle in that city for 30 years and raise your kids as Chelsea football fans. All of us can point to moments of extreme influence to our life's course that we didn't know at the time would be so dispositive; marriage, however, is not one of them. We know - or presume, at least - at the very outset that this will likely turn out to be the most critical choice we ever make. Marriage is pregnant with possibility and portent, yet paradoxically is the ultimate point of no return as well. For that very reason marriage is a momentous milestone of maturity. The acts of choosing one person for life, consecrating that selection in ceremony in front of families and friends, and symbolically shedding the individualism inherent in singledom, all contribute to mark, in some senses, the end of the beginning. Marriage accelerates the onset of adulthood like no other event, and it should. This is not to suggest that one cannot be an adult without getting married, of course. Being a husband or wife to someone is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to adulthood, unfortunately. Moreover, a church or civil ceremony is not needed, either, to confirm a commitment between two people. What remains true, however, is that marriage - in its literal or more allegorical sense - is for many the watershed moment between adolescence and adulthood. 

4) Munchkins I'm never been married, nor do I have any children. But those of my friends who have done one, then the other (the traditional but increasingly less fashionable sequence) describe each stage quite differently. Marriage, they say, is largely an evolution on coupled life. Having kids, in contrast, is a revolution. It's easy to understand their point of view. Many of us have experienced living with a girlfriend, if not leading what essentially constitutes 'married life' with someone. Setting aside the sacrament of the wedding day, a young married couple's quotidian life is largely the same after the big day as before it. Sure, the stakes are higher and the stationary may have changed, but the fundamental dynamic of interaction has probably not altered one iota from pre to post matrimony. Not so when the munchkin arrives ... It's a cliche, but children change everything. The entire family unit shifts from being about your own wants and needs to the child's. The two individuals who previously made up the couple now fuse into a 'family', with its seemingly sole and central task to protect, provide for and promote the well-being of their son or daughter. Jon and Jen fade from view, replaced by the more functional titles of Daddy and Mommy; Exit personal time and parties, enter parenthood. Bringing another life into the world is probably the biggest responsibility one can ever assume. Monogamy was the first step on that road, but it can be undone without much consequence. Mortgages hold repercussions, but they threaten credit ratings, not defenseless kids. Marriage is a major statement of faith made to friends, family and especially the female with whom you're wedding, but alas we all know this doesn't make it impervious to the desire for do-overs. Marriage mulligans happen all the time. Munchkins, on the other hand, offer no such flexibility. Once you have a child, he or she is yours for life. In some ways, it's the ultimate caveat emptor. It is in that irreversibility that becoming a parent accelerates our inexorable movement to maturity. For the first time in your life, you really can't change your mind. There is no option (pace adoption or abandonment) but to fulfill the implicit promise you've made to your offspring to raise them to the best of your ability. It will mean DVD nights instead of decadent and debaucherous soirees, red eyes instead of rest, sacrifice instead of self-orientation. Doing so will require, as my cousin Marcus once eloquently put it, turning 'me' into 'we'. 

5) Monotony The responsibilities of parenthood are huge, but the rewards seem to be greater still. When one graduates to the rank of parent, we undertake the biggest role of our lifetime - in deeds if not in significance. You can't help but be matured by the experience, but also mellowed by your new lifestyle. Part of the challenge in adapting to parenthood, it seems to me, is accepting, even embracing, the simpler pleasures that parent life brings. My friends now find joy in pushing their daughters on the swing, when they used to thrive on putting the moves on someone else's daughter. Saturday mornings in the park now rightfully take precedence over Saturday nights at the pub. Moreover, my friends who have made this switch are genuinely happy. Sure, some grumble from time to time about missing some aspect of their formerly childless life, but all of them speak glowingly, evocatively and poignantly of the pleasure of coming home to their kids at the end of a long day. Play time to bath time, then bed time, is the new triple crown of contentment, even if these moments are largely routine and repetitive to the outside eye. Let's be honest: parent life is monotonous. But it's a marvelous monotony. Bringing your kids up is a blur of boring but beautiful moments: reading them stories, putting their snow pants on, carrying them to bed. Those early memories are joined by equally mundane, but no less meaningful, events: their first words, their first day at school, their first date. In the proverbial blink of an eye, twenty years of tiny steps forward - tender and wonderful for you, tedious and without significance for others - have come and gone. In this life-stage, time simultaneously slows down and speeds up. You experience seminal, singular and signature events much less frequently (that crazy weekend in St. Tropez!), and the sheer pace of change of your life comes to a crawl. On the flip side, the regular - and regulated - rhythm of parenthood paradoxically makes the years fly by. One has to mature before making monotony your friend. Much like quicksand, If you struggle against it you will suffocate; however, if you accept it warmly, you will be enveloped by its embrace. Maturity allows you to make this counter-intuitive leap of faith. 

6) Midlife At a certain point in time, you realize that you have more yesterdays than tomorrows. For some, that epiphany comes crashing through on a significant birthday - say when a man hits the big 4-oh. For others, it occurs at one of life's more natural inflection points, such as when your daughter gets married or your son gives you grandchildren. Whatever the trigger, some form of trauma will follow. Why? Because the idea that one has reached the turn in our life journey is among the most sobering thoughts that can cross the transom of our mind. Accepting that fact forces us to acknowledge that we've begun the home stretch of our existence. It means coming to grips with the concomitant decline in our capacities. It requires us to shelve some of our grander misconceptions about ourselves and what we would accomplish. In essence, midlife confronts us with the chilling calculus that we've reached the beginning of the end. Of course, one can choose to look at the glass half-full, and regard half-time with hope as much as apprehension. I commend the people who choose the optimist's path, and plan to be among them when I hear that whistle myself. Even if you do manage to summon that measure of sagacity however, the act can't help but age you. Either the thought of fewer tomorrows terrifies you, in which case one frantically fumbles for one last gasp of the future. Alternatively, one can serenely succumb to seniority, and accept that one's time is coming closer to the end. Regardless of the approach, midlife matures you in a subtle but unmistakable manner. It also foreshadows the penultimate phase of our life. 

7) Mortality I believe that we experience two deaths in life. The first comes with the final call on our 'childhood', when our last surviving parent passes. In that moment, we become parentless, and while it's ridiculous to compare the tragedy of a forty year-old orphan to that of a four year-old, the effect is doubtlessly still seismic on the psyche. At our core, we are all still someone's kids - even if we have some of our own. My aunt Rhea, a mother and grandmother, still calls her younger brother - my 65 year old Dad - 'le petit', and frets about how he's not 'used' to drinking wine. My Mom's eyes still well up when she thinks of her father, gone almost two decades now, and will sometimes refer to him in recollected conversations as Daddy. This is normal, and natural. In some important ways, one doesn't stop being a child; the heart is hardwired from birth to harken back to that parental bond with fondness. Losing that connection is like losing a limb: the pain may fade, but one's spirit is forever amputated by the loss. 

The death of our parents, taken by itself, would mark anyone's life as a milestone. However, the onset of their mortality also serves to presage our own. The passing of the past generation pushes us to death's front of the line. We suddenly become the elder statesmen of the family, the torch of leadership being thrown to us to hold high. This new role imbues us with responsibility, and forces us to look at life from a different perspective. One can't take health, and life, for granted from that point onwards. The future is irrevocably fraught with preoccupations about our 'second' death, the one that will inevitably come to visit us personally. 

Facing our ultimate end must be the most maturing moment of one's life, and it's fitting that the most significant step towards adulthood comes - literally and figuratively - last. But I imagine that for those days, months or years when we are keenly aware of our mortality but not yet upon it, life is sweeter, richer and more rewarding than at another point in time. That lesson - that life is fragile, fleeting and fabulous all at once - is the most important one of all; what a shame that too many of us realize it far too late. 

Maturity is an elusive concept. For some it's relative, for others an absolute. For me, it represents the crossing of certain milestones which I've laid out above. Monogamy, Mortgage, Marriage, Munchkins, Monotony, Midlife and Mortality are the 7 gates towards that higher consciousness, the major signposts on our road to adulthood. With the passage of each one, we add a layer of self-awareness, another ring to our personal tree of knowledge. 

While I generally regard these events to occur in this chronological order, they need not necessarily. Sadly, all too often marriage precedes monogamy and not vice-versa; munchkins can happily come before matrimony with great benefit to all involved. Others might suggest more appropriate - or indeed more personal - milestones that marked them profoundly. My list is not intended to be either definitive or exhaustive. Rather, it represents my first cut at cracking the code of adulthood, at charting the moments when we stopped being kids and started our path to personal responsibility, parenthood and perishability. In the final analysis, we're all entitled to our own view of what shapes or shaped our development from adolescence to adulthood. The actual stages matter less than the lessons learned, and the wisdom, perspective and self-knowledge gained from those experiences. 

When did my friends all become adults? I'm not certain that they have, but I'm sure they're on their way.

The Sex Appeal of Single Moms

I had a girlfriend a few years ago who made me the envy of all my friends. She was the complete package: beautiful, smart, fun, sexy, affectionate and literate all at once. She read 100 books a year, could quote Sartre as well as Shakespeare - in their native tongues - and found the time, despite her management position in a Fortune 500 company, to teach aerobics three times a week. Oh, and one other thing: she was recently divorced with a two year-old son. 

Surprised? Don't be. Single moms are in some ways the cream of the dating crop, and the sooner men discover this the better off they'll be. In fact many have, and whether you know it or not this concept has actually already entered the canon of popular culture. 

Indeed, no one can describe an idea as novel if it has caught the eye of a Hollywood scriptwriter. A number of years ago, Tom Cruise portrayed agent and professional bachelor Jerry Maguire in the eponymous movie, one that immortalized on celluloid both the quintessential sports star slogan "show me the money" as well as the bewitching charm of a vulnerable single mother and her preternaturally cute offspring. But the best example of this phenomenon might very well be About A Boy, the cinematic adaptation of Nick Hornby's best-selling novel describing Hugh Grant's passage from a self-absorbed, child-less, professionally single London playboy to a responsible, selfless boyfriend and father figure. While the film's emotional charm emerged out of the relationship Grant's character develops with the quirky twelve-year old son of a divorced, schizophrenic mother, its' humor stemmed from his early attempts to impersonate a single Dad in order to infiltrate the ranks of this heretofore-untapped vein of available women. 

Grant's character in the film may have been shallow, but he was no dummy. There is much to say about the sex appeal of single moms. First, the experience of weathering the storm of a marriage gone wrong or husband-less parenthood brings these women an exceptional combination of maturity and centeredness. Their lives are by necessity arrayed around the needs of their children, and this prevents them from lapsing into the indulgence of a single person's self-absorption. To men growing increasingly tired of nubile but vapid twenty-somethings, of Cristal-sipping, Aspen-holidaying sirens found frequenting Marquee in Manhattan and Ghost Bar in Las Vegas, that selflessness is sexy. 

There is another, perhaps less obvious advantage to dating a recently divorced woman: single moms long for physical closeness. First, they are often in their early to mid-thirties, in the throes of the much-documented female sexual peak. As well, having been through the emotional epic of wedding, separation and finally divorce, they don't have the time or the inclination to trifle with many of the inhibitions that used to chill their sense of sensuality. Finally, their emergence from failed relationships frequently has one last but critical consequence: simply put, they have often not been intimate for a long time. As a result, they are both liberated and libertine in their approach towards sexuality. 

The advantages of opening oneself up to dating single moms do not end there. For example, many of the issues that weigh heavily on a single man's mind - the ones that may have been the deal breakers of relationships past - no longer hold the potency or relevance in these post-marriage partnerships. Worried about that booming biological clock that drove some of you from your last girlfriend? That matter is moot when your new girlfriend already has a child of her own. How about the pressure to put a ring on her finger and consecrate your relationship in the bonds of holy matrimony? Divorced women, unsurprisingly, are reluctant to walk down the aisle any time soon after short-lived, 'starter' marriages. 

Of course, this holds up in theory, but in practice matters are not nearly so black and white. I'd only be telling half the story - and the superficial side at that - if I dwelled on sex or the promise of perpetual singledom as the key selling points of dating a single mom. For instance, while women with a child from a previous union feel less pressure to start their family soon, that doesn't mean the desire goes away entirely. In fact, single moms of single children are likely to want to give their son or daughter brothers and sisters to round out the family they started. Moreover, an unsuccessful marriage teaches women matrimonial caution, but rarely results in their complete reluctance to re-enter the fray. Indeed, with their marriage 'mulligans' behind them, single moms often aspire to getting it right the second time, and netting the husband and family they thought they were getting in the first. 

However, it must be said that single moms lack the 'form factor' of women without a marriage in their past and children in their present. For one, a divorced woman often brings an ex-husband with her in tow - a complication that makes one nostalgic for the halcyon days when all you had to deal with was her ex-boyfriends. That was never easy, any man will tell you; but coming to grips with a former husband - a man who your girlfriend once took an oath to cherish and to hold 'til death do them part - is another matter altogether. But wait, there's more: ex-husbands also frequently have their second starring role as fathers, a title conferring upon them an important veto power over your relationship with his now ex-wife: joint custody of the children. A father's right to see his children regularly is a wholly legitimate, if not entirely desirable circumstance; however, that right can also restrain the new couple from contemplating professional or personal opportunities that might require moving the family hearth. If you thought asking her Dad for her hand in marriage might be a difficult conversation, consider how you might go about soliciting her ex-husband's permission to move his former wife and children across the country. 

Then there's the matter of the children. No single man is fully prepared, I should warn you, to go from the standing stop of bachelorhood to the putative fatherhood of dating a single mom. It's not just the modalities of child-rearing that are difficult to adjust to - the sleepless nights with young babies, or the reality that most hot dates with your girlfriend will take place at home, with a video, after the kids have gone to bed. There is also the realization, implied if not explicit, that as the boyfriend you can only ever hope to come in second in her life - appropriately, behind her children. Finally, there is the child - who represents a living, breathing totem to the existence of her previous relationship and, whether you understand this or not, a sacred trust which you undertake to shoulder to some greater or lesser degree. Being 'Mommy's boyfriend' brings very little power but certain responsibility, and that has to be factored into any decision to date a single mother. 

Of course, her children can just as easily be a source of happiness than simply a dating hazard. One of my favorite activities with my former girlfriend was the ritual of putting her two-year-old to bed. From the elaborate set-piece of giving him a bath (where I played the small but crucial twin roles of bubble-blower and towel-dryer), followed by the teeth-brushing, cotton-swabbing, pajamas choosing and - saving the best for last - the reading of the bedtime story, I soaked up little Maxwell's unadulterated joy, his barely contained excitement at sharing his last moments of energy before sleep, his tiny, frail body slumping into my shoulder as I flipped the last page and heard his soft, sweet breaths turn to slumber and snoring. Sure, having Maxie in the picture brought complications to our relationship, but his smile and countenance shined a light so bright that, for the time I was involved with his mother, I could barely comprehend my luck at finding a wonderful woman and a wonderful family life all at once. 

Despite these complications - perhaps as a result of them, even - single moms are, in many ways, the gold standard in the 21st century single scene. A post-marriage relationship may lack the simplicity and predictability that men have come to crave, but it more than makes up for it in substance, sensuality and simple pleasures. Hugh Grant and Tom Cruise had it right.

Being Alone Together

I'm not ashamed to say that I love Starbucks. Anti-globalization forces may hate me for it, but I find the sight of the familiar green sign a warm and welcoming invitation to pop in, order an Ice Mocha (even in winter!) and settle in for some serious reading or reflecting. 

It appears that I'm not alone in enjoying this activity. Have you been to a Starbucks lately? These days, it seems easier to get a lewd instant message from a Congressman than it is to find a spare seat - let alone a table! - at your local Starbucks. Why is that? 

It's not just for the coffee. Starbucks has shrewdly responded to one of our contemporary society's silent needs, which is to provide a venue for people to 'be alone together'. Look around the next time you're in such a place, and you will probably be struck, as I have been, by the number of people sitting alone at their tables sipping coffee. 

Some of them are students, as evidenced by their text books and laptops splayed across multiple tables (can you tell that this is a pet peeve of mine?). For high schoolers, Starbucks is the preferred place for "studying" (in quotation marks because I'm not so sure how much studiousness is on display). After all, many high schools don't have large libraries like universities do, so the local cafe is filling a void in the social and scholastic firmament. University students seem to like Starbucks as well, eschewing the campus library for reasons relating to their stodginess and sub-par coffee perhaps. 

Some of them are 'free agents', to use Dan Pink's term describing self-employed individuals who use such public spaces - especially ones with Wi-Fi Internet access - as their surrogate office. Still others are people who use the coffee and company as fuel for contemplative tasks, such as writing their great American novel or catching up on this week's Economist. 

I fall in the latter category. After noticing this habit, I began to wonder why I did some of my best reading or thinking there, and why Saturday afternoons at Starbucks became a sacrosanct part of my weekend schedule. It seems that such coffee shops offer the perfect combination of stimulation and silence for contemporary, attention-deficit-addled adolescents and adults. I've come to call this phenomenon the need for 'social solitude.' 

First, there's the coffee. The invigorating effects of caffeine are obvious to anyone who has had a cup of joe, but coffee has both a soothing and stimulating effect on its drinkers. The feel of the warm mug in your hands after a walk in the brisk autumn air is comforting, while the aroma of freshly roasted coffee beans is to many both fragrant and friendly. 

But that's only part of the story. Perhaps more significantly, Starbucks provides a semi-quiet place to read and reflect amid a whirl of social activity. Think about it: Starbucks are rarely empty spaces; in fact, they are often located at densely trafficked street corners to take advantage of significant urban footfall. If you're lucky enough to get a window seat at say, the Starbucks in Time Square in New York City, you can watch as literally the world walks by. Even if you don't happen to be in Midtown Manhattan or at the Coffee Bean on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, often the 'action' in the coffee house offers just enough stimulation to sate your thirst. 

If I'm representative of the average young adult 'being alone together' in Starbucks, the common experience goes something like this. One reads or writes a number of pages in a flurry of caffeine-induced focus, but seeing as though we've all become a bit attention-deficit-prone our concentration wanes a bit. When distraction strikes, you have a number of options to steer yourself back on track. You can look up and take in the scene around you. I sometimes try to figure out what that couple sitting across the room might be saying to each other, or what the back-story could be behind that young lady pecking away at her computer for the past few hours. 

If you're a curious type, you can tune in momentarily to a conversation close by, and listen to part of the back-and-forth between two mothers discussing - what else? - their kids. If you're within sight of the door, you can watch the incoming flow of traffic and see if you recognize any of the newest additions to the social menagerie. Still another option is to strain and peer outside, catching a glimpse of the cars, people and pets that whizz by the window. Finally, there's the obvious alternative (and perhaps the most sought-after activity, from Starbucks accountants' point of view) of getting up, stretching your legs and trekking over to the barista bar to order another Mocha Frappuchino. Once you have been sufficiently stimulated, you can then go back to the task at hand for another concentrated stretch - until the next 'study break' beckons. 

Starbucks has, it seems, become the adult university library for us all, providing a public place for an increasingly individualistic society. The iPod-wearing hordes who walk wordlessly down the urban arteries convene in venues like these to, in some sense, commune together over coffee and a curious yet contemporary form of company. In bygone days, people used to find community in parks, playgrounds and public squares. Today, that vision of civic society has been replaced by what Robert Putnam described so presciently in his 2000 essay as 'bowling alone.' The phenomenon I've described here of 'social solitude' is surely part of a larger societal shift from community to individuality, from 'we' to 'me', and it will almost certainly find corollaries in other popular personal | public behaviors from blogging to participating in social networks. I don't aspire to explain it all in this post, but merely to document one small aspect of it that I've discerned then open it up for consideration and debate. 

The next time you pop in to your local coffee shop, look up from your paper or laptop for a moment and take in the scene. You might be witnessing one of the more profound socio-cultural shifts of this young new century. You might notice that, in the immortal words of Sting and the Police's classic Message in a Bottle, "seems like I'm not alone at being alone" ...