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.
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 ...
Posted at 05:01 PM in History, Media, Modernity, Pop Culture, Pop Philosophy, Social commentary, Social trends, Web | Tech | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
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