Pop Philosophy

What Tom Brady can teach you about what it takes to be a Leader today

Tom Brady - not Donald Trump - is the epitome of what a modern leader should be. Believe me, as a Dallas Cowboy fan(atic), it pains me to write that. However, I’ve come to realize that great QBs like Brady combine timeless virtues of sacrifice, courage and leadership by example along with Nate Silver-like data processing skills. To succeed on the football field these days, QBs have to be one part Achilles and one part algorithm.

Let’s look at the traditional tool kit first. The demands on leaders evolve, but some elements remain constant. A team - or an army - will only follow someone into battle if they are inspired by their sacrifice, courage and example. Tom Brady checks these boxes.

Sacrifice

When you tune in on Sunday, remember that these players have been preparing for this moment all year and - in some senses - their entire lives. From their winter off-season training regimens to summer training camp, they’ve continuously pushed, lifted and iced their bodies to be physically ready for this game. Sometimes, the sacrifice is more about what they don’t do.  Boston.com once interviewed Tom Brady's personal chef, who revealed that he eats a diet so strict that it consists of 80 percent vegetables - and doesn't include dairy, coffee, mushrooms, peppers, tomatoes, white sugar, white flour or salt!

Elite QBs have to go further than simply lifting weights and eating right, though. Every week, they invest hours reviewing film of their performances, as well as those of their upcoming opponents, in an effort to gain any edge that will prove decisive in a pivotal moment. Peyton Manning, perhaps the most cerebral QB of all time, was legendary for his commitment to film room study. If he played on Sunday afternoon, he was already dissecting his plays that same evening.

So modern QBs have to marry preparation with perspiration - but that alone is not enough to succeed. They also have to be the bravest men on the field.

Show Courage

Imagine a lightning-fast 290 lb JJ Watt bearing down on you with malicious intent - and then realize that there could be 3 other equally hulking defensive linemen coming behind him, along with a few others if you’re facing an all-out blitz (“bringing the house”, in football parlance). Then picture yourself standing resolutely in a rapidly collapsing  “pocket” (the small space created by your offensive linemen blocking the behemoths) and waiting until your receiver hits his mark to throw the ball - even though you know you’re about to get crushed. Now get up, dust yourself off … and be ready to do that again and again - for the next 3 hours.

Showing courage is one way that QBs lead by example. but there are other, sometimes even more effective means to inspire your team mates.

Lead by Example

Sports Illustrated had a much-discussed cover story a few years ago about Brady’s fanatical training and preparation, and out of it came this telling anecdote. ” When Rodney Harrison played with Brady, the safety showed up at 6:40 a.m. to lift weights. "Good afternoon," Brady said to him. So the next day Harrison showed up at 6:30. "Good afternoon." Then 6:20. Then 6:10. Then 6. "Good afternoon" each time, until Harrison finally said, "Screw you, Tom. I'm not coming in any earlier."

It’s not just what they do in the days and weeks before the game, but also what they master in the seconds before each snap - that mark signal callers as model 21st century leaders.

Process Big Data in seconds

When QBs step up to the line of scrimmage, you might think that not much is going on. Nothing could be further from the truth. After having just called the play in the huddle (something “simple”, like flip right duo X motion fake roll 98 block pass special), the QB visualizes each route up to 5 receivers will run while simultaneously comparing the call with the “look” the defence is giving him. He has to “read” the defensive alignment facing him, sift through his hours of film preparation to see if he recognizes a certain tendency that can predict what it means, and then determine if his play is the right one of TWO (typically QBs have a back-up play call for each down), make a decision (keep play 1 or switch to play 2) and then execute the necessary adjustments to his player formation and protection scheme. Sound complicated? Now realize that all of this happens in 10 seconds. QBs today have to be able to think like IBM’s Watson, except that they’re doing it in front of 11 men trying to kill them and - on Super Bowl Sunday - a hundred million watching them.

Believe it or not, that’s the “easy” part.

Make great decisions consistently under stress and physical duress

In the face of this enormous pressure, 80,000 screaming, hostile fans and a howling wind and snow if you’re playing in Green Bay in November, Tom Brady now has about 2.5 seconds after the ball is snapped to drop back, avoid getting crushed by the other team’s mastodons, and throw a football 25 yards downfield to a point where he believes his receiver will be - all the while threading the needle between multiple layers of defensive coverage.

Imagine doing this for this three hours while trying to succeed, but almost as importantly also avoiding disaster. On that topic …

Remember the Lesson, Forget the Mistake

… QBs have to have short memories. When they make a crushing error - like throwing a drive-killing interception - they don’t have the luxury of wallowing in self-pity. Great QBs quickly learn the lesson from that miscue - don’t throw into a 2 deep zone! - and then have to “forget” about it. If you’re still preoccupied by that pick the next time you go out on the field, you’re even more likely to make another mistake.

Your job on Sunday: Appreciate the Artistry

Great QBs like Tom Brady are the new prototype CEOs. The next time you catch Monday Night Football, take a minute to appreciate the hidden complexity of what you’re watching. Marvel at the months of sacrifice, the days of constantly leading by example, the hours of preparation, the sixty minutes to avoid a killer mistake and the seconds these men have to digest all that information in order to make it all come together in to a magical moment.

Old Rules for a New Life in the New Year

 

People usually become contemplative as another year ends and a new one begins. For many, this is the season for reflection, resolutions and perhaps even re-invention. I’m no exception to this ritual.

The following thoughts came to me a few weeks ago in a feverish night of waking and writing, epigram by epigram. As the title suggests, none of these ideas are particularly new, and they’ve all been inspired by philosophers both ancient and modern. However, I believe that these perennial truths still provide guidance for 2013 by focusing us on what’s important to remember every year.

Someone once noted that “truth is not new; it’s old.” I couldn’t agree more. In that vein, let me propose some old rules for a new life in the New Year.

What you do is more important that what you say. This is true for everything from relationships to New Year’s resolutions.

However, you are not what you do. You are not a lawyer, or a doctor. Instead, you are what excites and inspires you – in my case, a reader, writer, thinker, and for others perhaps a Mom, mentor or motorcycle rider. The point is …

You are much more interesting than you realize; your work is much less interesting than you realize. So adjust what you say about yourself to others accordingly.

 

You are not what you earn. In fact, any dollar earned over $75,000 a year doesn't add a dime of happiness or self worth. (Believe it. It's true.) So quit buying into what magazines, Madison Avenue and Mad Men are selling you, and get out of their Matrix. Take the blue pill ... to bliss.

Similarly, you are not what you buy. You are not just a consumer – or at least you don’t have to be. Did you know that in North America, the storage industry (comprised of places to store the things for which we can’t find room) is bigger than the movie industry? There’s more to life than accumulating ‘stuff’ – or at least there should be.

You are not only as good as your last sale. But you are only as good as the last commitment that you’ve kept - to yourself or someone else. You are also being controlled by your unprocessed emotions. Deal with them both now, and they won't hold any more power over you in the future.

You are in a category of one, or at least you should aspire to be. Jerry Garcia (for some, the legendary leader of The Grateful Dead; for others, the inspiration for Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream) advised that you don’t want to be the best at what you do; “you want to be considered the only ones who do what you do." So be like Jerry … and be unlike anybody else.

Make time for “the important but not urgent.” Dwight Eisenhower once noted “the most urgent decisions are rarely the most important ones.” Yet we tend devote so much of our mind space to the latest txt message or email, putting off the truly strategic decisions that don’t scream out for our attention. Ignore the day-to-day drudgery of “metro, boulot, dodo” and ask yourself: when will you deal with the matters that are important but not urgent?

In that vein, remember that not deciding is a decision. People assume that deferring a choice preserves all of your options, whereas the opposite is almost always true. Most people didn’t decide not to have children; they just never got around to having them. Is that the right way to make such a life-changing choice?

Getting Older … but not Old

You are not a number. And if you are, it's how many good books you've read (or written), how many lives you've touched, not how many winters you've seen.

If you were born 43 years ago, then you are 43 years YOUNG. Isn't it ironic that we live longer than ever, but we're also more obsessed than ever about our age? Was there ageism in the Middle Ages? I don't think so. You are as old as you look, act and feel.

 

In that light, you are going to feel old at 4-0 ... until an eighty-year old looks back wistfully at her forties in front of you. George Bernard Shaw famously remarked, “youth is wasted on the young”, but he was only half-right: adulthood is as well. However "old" you are now, you're young to someone - and younger than you will be tomorrow. So live like it.

Choosing … to be happy

You are more motivated by avoiding pain than by seeking pleasure. The sooner you grasp that, the sooner you'll step off the savannah, leave the Stone Age, and become modern.

You are where you are because of your choices, not because of chance or circumstance. The moment you accept that, the more control over life you will have.

Some of those choices are going to be mistakes. If so, make them magnificent by learning from them.

Moreover, your failures reflect more on you than your successes. Why? Because you are directly responsible for the former, but chances are the latter happened by chance. If, as Rudyard Kipling suggested, you can treat triumph and disaster as “two imposters just the same”, you can also take solace in the fact that failure is as temporary as success.

You probably keep your bank statements but throw out your old love letters. Stop.

You are worthy of love, but only if you love yourself. You will find love someday, but only when you give it out first. It’s a little like finding that pair of sunglasses you misplaced; you never find something when you’re looking too hard for it.

You aren't going to find happiness by looking for or chasing it, either. You are only going to be happy by forgetting about it.

You are being judged ... but mostly by yourself. We are all the lead characters in our own one-man (or one woman) Broadway show. Get over yourself, but also forgive yourself, too. People care less about you than you think, but they care more for you than you realize. Understand the difference.

You live life forward, but you understand life backwards (I wish that I had said that, but Søren Kierkegaard did). So flip the script and instead of looking for answers, start by asking the right questions. Questions like …

What is your ‘why’? Find out what actually motivates you, and whether it is more about hope or fear. Ask yourself three questions: what gets you up in the morning? What keeps you up at night? And what are you going to do about it?

How to Live

You are what you repeatedly do, as Aristotle said. You are your habits, routines and commitments. You aren't what you say you will do ... yet. But you can be.

You are, whether you realize it or not, what you eat, read, and watch ... in your media diet. So pay attention to what you're feeding your mind, and whether it’s healthy or just making other people wealthy.

You are also who you spend most of your time with. Did you know that you eat 40% more with another person and 60% more with 2 or more? Whether you want to or not, you become how they are. So choose your influences wisely.

You are not missing out on something amazing elsewhere; chances are, you are missing out on something very good right here … but you’re too busy txting, tweeting and instagramming about it to notice and pay attention. Be. Here. Now.

You are almost certainly letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Don't. The perfect is far from perfect if it never happens, and the good is more than good enough if it actually does.

You are probably doing the easier wrong rather than the harder right. Take my word for it: you're only hurting yourself more later by not being strong enough to hurt now.

You may very well be facing a dilemma right now. If you're honest with yourself, you know what to do. You just don't want to do it. Discipline is doing what we don't want to do when we don't want to do it. Be disciplined.

Experiences instead of Extra Toys

You aren't going to remember days, but you are going to remember moments. So begin living with that end in mind.

You need Wednesdays to enjoy Saturdays, and winters to find ecstasy in summers. Treat the tough times as mere appetizers for the good.

In life, you usually come to regret the things you didn't do more than you things than you did. Sometimes, you encounter choices that you will regret either way: you will regret having done them just as you would have regretted having not done them. That's part of life, too.

You are more likely to die in the drive to the airport than you are in an airplane crash. You are also more likely to be hit by lightning than win the lottery. So start pricing risk and reward more accurately, and start living with your head and not fearing with your heart.

You are going to have to lose most things in order to appreciate them. So don't - don't take them for granted, and you won't lose them.

If you ignore the advice above, you are going to lose everything - one step at a time. This is as true of relationships as it is riches. So pay attention to the signs: they're there. We just don't usually see them until it’s too late to change the outcome.

Invest in what matters most

Be a social capitalist. Invest in people and relationships instead of stocks and bonds.

You are parsimonious with praise (which is free) but free with your time (which is not). Compliments don't cost you anything, and they can mean everything to a person. On the other hand, time is the only truly non-renewable resource. A minute lost is gone - forever. So be profligate with encouraging words and prudent about wasting time.

Accept that you are replaceable - to your Friday night poker game, your hockey team and your company. You are irreplaceable to your friends, your family, and your community. So get your priorities right, and focus your time on the places where your presence is truly missed.

Plan your exits as carefully as you do your entrances. On that note, you are what you lead and what you seed. So use your gifts to create a legacy, and realize that you haven't succeeded until you are no longer needed.

Some people have doubts about their faith in themselves. That’s normal. But you should also have doubts about your doubt. Why are you so certain that you can’t do it? The first step always looks harder than it actually is.

You are a just a man ... But you could become a Mandela (or a Mother Teresa). Don't be limited by the walls of a prison you create. Free yourself so that you can lead others to freedom.

You are a good person, and you should be. You aren't a great person, but you could be.

Get used to the fact that life doesn’t unfold in a linear way. It’s all about streaks and sprints, setbacks and second efforts. Don’t confuse where you find yourself right now with where you’ll end up. The Chinese got it right when they said: the best time to have planted a tree is 25 years ago. The second-best time is today.

Right now, you are exactly one moment wiser. Act like it, and act on it.

Happy 2013 ~

The Great Disruption

What the global economy, Blockbuster, going solo, hook-up culture, asynchronous intimacy, the Apple Maps app and ‘Homeland’ all have in common

We live in a world of broken models, columnist Robert Samuelson noted recently in The Washington Post. In his essay, Samuelson speculated that “to understand why world leaders can’t easily fix the sputtering global economy, you have to realize that the economic models on which the United States, Europe and China relied are collapsing.”

Samuelson confined his analysis to macroeconomics, but he's actually on to something. We find ourselves in a world turned upside down.  The Greatest Generation had to survive the Great Depression; our generation, I believe, is being asked to navigate (rather than survive) the Great Disruption.

Let me explain. It's now conventional wisdom that companies from Blockbuster (RIP) to Borders (RIP) have seen their traditional business models disrupted. In the case of the former, their video stores were challenged by the advent of DVDs by mail, courtesy of Netflix. In the case of the latter, the transition from retail to e-commerce (and, soon, e-books) pioneered by Amazon hastened Borders’ demise. Even 'new' companies like BlackBerry (RIP soon?) are seeing their once mighty technological advantages being leapfrogged in the space of months, not years. It’s often said that “a week is a lifetime in politics.” This is increasingly true about business. For almost every company, the world as they knew it no longer exists.

But what if that described the rest of “life”, as well? What if our 'living models' are being disrupted today as much as business models have been?  This is exactly what's happening, only it may not be as obvious.

From the way we live, date, mate and marry, traditional pillars of society are being transformed.

Taken together, it seems that we’re living through a revolution just slow enough to slip by almost unnoticed, but significant enough to upend our world.

Did you know that for the first time ever, a majority of Americans (51%) today are single? How about that 1 in 3 of Americans live alone? That number, by the way, rises to half the population in cities like Washington, DC and Manhattan. It’s not just that people are increasingly “going solo” or are putting off getting married; in some cases they are postponing that milestone - forever. Holy matrimony is not happening as often as it used to. When weddings do occur, they’re no longer necessarily between a man and a woman ( that's a good thing), and the unions are not lasting as long as they used to (that’s a bad thing).

Even the road to marriages and baby carriages has changed. These days, finding that partner - let alone a future husband or wife - is more complicated than ever before. Courtship, if it does exist, is far removed from the Ritchie Cunningham era of dates, dances, making out and going out.

Today, young people are txting instead of talking, sexting instead of playing spin the bottle, surfing internet porn instead of sneaking peeks at Playboy magazines.

This is all part of Hookup Culture. But when did it become A-OK for girls to announce that they were DTF? We live in a brave new world of what I call ‘asynchronous intimacy’. People used to get know each other, then have sex. Today, it’s not an exaggeration to say that they have sex, and then get to know each other (if at all). 

Time-honored social norms have been abandoned. Some of this is progress, to be sure; but even desirable advances represent a double-edged sword. For instance, there are more women than men attending college now, and women are increasingly getting ahead in the classroom, the boardroom and the living room. The flip side is that soon it will be difficult for a university degree-holding female to find a similarly-educated boyfriend, or a husband who earns as much as she does. 

There are what economists call externalities to all of these developments - broader social costs that we rarely factor in when contemplating the full impact of such changes.

More people living alone means greater self-fulfillment, but probably an increased risk of social isolation as well. The notion of what constitutes a couple is simultaneously being defined down (hook-ups and “friends with benefits”) as well as more expansively (same-sex unions, common law partnerships). Girls feel more free to hook up, but it’s eliminated the requirement for guys to court and emotionally connect with them first. Women are moving up in the world, but they’re going to be forced to “date down”.

More generally, people don't have the benefit of "social GPS" anymore. They don't know where they are, they don’t know where they stand, and they don’t have directions to where they’re going. It’s as if all of  us are iPhones 5s, and we just downloaded the terrible Apple Maps App: the Statue of Liberty simply isn’t where it’s supposed to be.

I'm a student of history. When it comes to change, I believe that much of what we say is du jamais vu has, in fact, been seen before. Globalization is one such ‘new’ development … that's been happening since Jean-Baptiste Colbert (no relation to Stephen) and the emergence of 17th century mercantilism. But what is new is the pace of change. Cars replaced horses over multiple decades; TV overtook radio in 15 years; Facebook went from a way for a nerd to meet girls to a 100 billion dollar company (at its IPO, at least) with one billion users in just 7.

How much have things changed in those last 7 years?

As Thomas Friedman remarked, in 2005 "when I wrote The World is Flat,  Skype was a typo, Twitter was a sound, 4G was a parking spot." Today’s ascendant generation - the Millennials - has never known a world without YouTube, PVRs or iPhones.  

Not only is every aspect of life getting fstr, the cycle times are getting shorter. We have less time to adjust to these deep and wide changes in society, and they're coming at us like a Twitter feed.

This is not a stable state, nor an end one necessarily. The old rules are out of date, but new ones haven’t been set yet. So what can we do in the face of this Great Disruption? First, grab tight and hold on.  Then, just as businesses had to reinvent themselves to adapt to new economic models, we need to rebuild our social models to adjust to the new realities. 

On one level, we have to become comfortable being uncomfortable.

We have to make peace with being a little lost. But we also have to make sense of this emerging landscape, and develop new (or old) ways to navigate it for the long term. This might mean moving forward, by redefining how society looks at single people and the state regards civil unions. It might also require, however, looking backward - and returning to a bygone era where people met, dated and mated in that order.

We can’t be trapped by the tyranny of “progress”, nor by the orthodoxy of the past. Perhaps most importantly, we can’t simply sit still. “Life” is being disrupted before our eyes, and all of us, individually and collectively, risk the fates of Blockbuster and Borders - of being left behind. 

I’m not arguing for a return to a “Happy Days” world, or an acceptance of a “Girls” one for that matter, either. But I do think that we need to snap back to a more thought-out and sustainable posture vis a vis this Great Disruption. My new favorite TV show is “Homeland”. It’s a taut psychological thriller that spins dark webs of deceit amid double-clutch plot twists and revelations. The two central characters - CIA agent Carrie Matheson and ex-POW and possible Manchurian Candidate Nicholas Brody - live in a lie-within-a-lie world. The show’s central appeal is the thoroughly disorienting sensation of not knowing what is real, who is the good character and the bad, and how both Carrie and Brody periodically lose and regain control of their lives.

In a sense, we all now live in a “Homeland” world - not one in which a Congressman may be a Muslim mole, or the CIA agent pursuing him may be mad - but one where good and bad, progress and regress, control and chaos all sit side by side.

Welcome to the Great Disruption.

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 ...

 

Aphorisms - Advice and Antidote for an Attention-Deficit-Addled Age

I am an aspiring aphorist. No, that doesn't mean that I'm afraid of florists or want to become a wrist specialist. An aphorist is someone who writes aphorisms. 

What is an aphorism, you ask? Many people don't recognize the word, yet an aphorism is one of those rare concepts in the English language that everyone knows what it is but no one knows what it's called.  

Thoroughly confused? I thought so. Let me try to do for aphorisms what they do for us, namely make a complicated idea both beautiful and simple. An aphorism is a profound but pithy phrase of wisdom, often perfectly put in a memorable sentence or two. They embody the Jesuits' maxim, so perfectly summed up in the epigram 'Precision of Thought, Economy of Expression'.

They can be both poetic and prosaic. Some people know them as adages, others as sayings. The more derisive among us might dismiss them as cliches and fortune cookie messages, while Zen monks recite them as koans and mantras. However you feel about aphorisms, the one undeniable reality is that they've been around as long as man has been able to think and speak (in that order). 

Socrates gave us one of history's first aphorisms when he noted - almost as a coda for future aphorists - that "the unexamined life is not worth living." That's essentially what aphorists do: they examine a particular aspect of life and distill it into a pointed or poignant phrase that captures - and delivers - an enormous amount of wisdom in a wonderfully economical way. 

As you've probably gathered by now, I love aphorisms (just for the record, it's pronounced Ah-Four-ISM). They appeal to my penchant for (pop) philosophical analysis, but also to my love of language. Aphorisms are examples of style and substance, form and function; They deliver more punch in a phrase than most writers do in a page. Aphorisms are to life's observers what the japanese haiku is to an aspiring poet: they represent the most challenging medium through which to express one's art. 

Aphorisms are also, quite accidentally, perhaps the perfect antidote to our current attention-deficit-addled age. This is because they have the unique capability of passing on profound lessons in incredibly concise doses. In an era characterized (and cursed) by six-second attention spans, aphorisms deliver valuable advice in energy-efficient vehicles. Twitter, IM and SMS are the most important media to this generation, and even these limited text technologies can be used to deliver these concise nuggets of wisdom. 

  George Bernard Shaw memorably wrote that "Youth is wasted on the young." Oscar Wilde - one of history's great aphorists - added: "I am not young enough to know everything." I couldn't agree with them more. As the recent film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button artfully demonstrated, life would make a lot more sense if we 'aged' in the other direction and got younger as we advanced in years. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard understood this intuitively when he noted wryly that "you understand life backward but you live life forward." 

I believe that today's younger generations have a tremendous amount to gain from studying these 'Ancients' through their aphorisms. In fact, these proverbs represent almost perfect nano-philosophies for the ADD Generation. What college student, blithely bingeing on pizza and beer at 3 am, would not benefit from Wilde's advice that they shouldn't take the power of their youth for granted? What twenty-something young professional, about to embark on an uncertain career trajectory, would not take some solace in Lao-Tzu's immortal adage that even "a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step"? 

In fact, the journey analogy is quite apt. Aphorisms provide you with a road map to life, giving you turn-by-turn directions to navigate around almost any obstacle. 

Have you recently lost a job as a result of the global economic crisis? You would do well to remember Epicurus's words that "a man is wealthy in proportion to the things he can do without." 

Perhaps you are a recent college graduate, looking for your first 'real' job, or even a mid-career professional contemplating a radical change in vocation? Then this proverb from Confucius will provide some sound advice to you: "find a job that you love, and you'll never work a day in your life." 

Maybe you're an anxious boyfriend, wracked with worry about whether your girl will cheat on you? Then this observation from Mark Twain can soothe your soul: "I have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened." 

Aphorisms don't just help you with the challenges that life throws at you; they can also teach you how to enjoy life itself. They don't always come inscribed on stone tablets or in musty old tomes, either. One of the simplest - but paradoxically most profound - pieces of wisdom I've ever received came from a lyric in a Sheryl Crow song, namely that "happiness is wanting what you have, not getting what you want". 

I come from a long line of aphorists. My grandfather penned one of the better (but alas least well-known) epigrams of his time when he used to sign his philosophical pamphlets with the tag line "Wealth, like health, should be at the expense of nobody." Later, his son, my Dad, the original 'Pop' Philosopher, eloquently observed one day, when talking about the difference between academics and political leaders, that unfortunately "thinkers rarely get the opportunity to do, and doers rarely get the opportunity to think." 

Not one to break with family tradition, I have also tried my hand at coining the pithy, philosophical phrase. For instance, friends have often heard me remark that "you have to have a Wednesday to have a Saturday", meaning that we have to suffer the difficult first in order to enjoy the sublime. Others have agreed with my observation that "relationships are like snowflakes; they look alike, but no two are identical." One of my former bosses like to quote my saying (probably unconsciously cribbed from someone else, no doubt) that "people prefer to edit rather than write". I appear to like to do both ... 

Clearly, my best days in this field are in front of me. Luckily, as someone once poetically observed, I feel like I have 'more tomorrows than yesterdays' right now. I may be wrong on that front, but I don't think I am on the other, larger point that these phrases deliver trenchant - and sometimes transcendental - truths that are perfectly suited for this era of Twitter attention spans. 

I wish that I had discovered aphorisms earlier in life. Armed with their wisdom, I might have saved myself from some sadness and instead followed Eleanor Roosevelt's sound advice to "learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself." After all, aphorisms are essentially attempts by their authors to pass on for free the hard-earned wisdom for which they paid dearly. Why not take them up on their generous offer? The price is right, and in the parlance of finance professionals - a group of people, if I ever met one, that would also benefit from studying aphorisms - the upside reward far outweighs the downside risk. 

I'm still only an aspiring aphorist. However, even if I never add my name to this most distinguished list, I'll have benefited from being in their company. As the French essayist (and extremely prolific aphorist in his own right) Montaigne eloquently once said, "I quote others only the better to express myself."

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.

Thinking seriously about not-so-serious things

Socrates may have invented philosophy when he famously declared that "the unexamined life is not worth living." 

I'm not a philosopher, nor do I really aspire to be one - at least not in the classic sense of the term. The ancient Philosophers addressed such weighty matters as the existence of God, the meaning of Truth and the nature of Ethics. People still debate those fundamental issues today, and they should. On some level, however, those questions have been 'asked and answered' many times over, as the legal expression goes. 

Ludwig Wittengenstein - who was a real Philosopher - perhaps described his profession best when he remarked that "Philosophy is not a theory but an activity". Pop culture commentator Chuck Klosterman, who is not a real philosopher, could have been describing what I see as the purview of this place when he wrote in his inimicably irreverent way about "philosophy for shallow people." Pop Philosophy, for me, lies somewhere in between these two propositions. 

The salons of Classical Philosophy tackled the profound and the past. Pop Philosophy will be a forum to discuss the prosaic and the present. I want to turn the pop philosopher's lens less on the issues that matter, and more on the subjects than matter most - for good or for ill - in many people's minds. Socrates' dictum still holds true, but isn't there a virtue in examining some of the more mundane aspects of life as well as its great, central questions? 

I believe there is. Contemporary society contains innumerable topics which beg for considered discussion, from the changing nature of relationships in a post-modern age to the impact of technology on the minds and manners of teenagers today. These matters deserve to be dissected and debated, if only because they preoccupy people today more than the great imponderable ones do. I'm fascinated by issues arising from media, politics, modernity, men and women, psychology, sociology and society, to name but a few. I hope to use this space to modestly propose my commentaries and middlebrow musings on those topics - the prosaic preoccupations of this pop philosopher. 

Philosophy, in this sense, is certainly more an avocation than a vocation for me. I like to examine life, propose theories, engage and joust in vigorous, thought-provoking conversation. Sometimes I turn my curiosity on serious issues. More often, I think perhaps a little too deeply on slightly more frivolous questions. Perhaps there are some of you out there a bit like me. I suspect there are. 

This, then, is a place for 'philosophy' for the rest of us. Join me in thinking seriously about not-so-serious things ...