Tuesday, March 19, 2019, Delray Beach, Florida


Notes From My Journal

Talking Business With Academics

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CJ, my partner in the effort to free wrongly convicted felons, and I had a meeting today with a California college that has offered to help us by providing student interns from its Law and Criminal Justice departments.

There were about eight people at the video conference. Although I had been told that the meeting would be about the prospect of doing a documentary on the project, I quickly discovered that nobody quite knew what we were going to talk about. I felt the need to get things moving, and respectfully suggested that we define our objective and set a time (30 minutes) for ending the meeting. This had an immediately positive effect.

Aside from unofficially leading the agenda, I realized that I had to do something else: I had to sell everyone on the value of contributing their time and effort to this cause. So I did my elevator pitch. I explained that if we found the right candidate, someone that had been falsely convicted for a capital offense, it would provide the school with a community-related and altruistic mission that it could publicize. And it would provide its students with lots of interesting and challenging work.

Everyone expressed excitement at the vision. But then came the hard part.

In a business environment, once the vision is adopted, decisions about who does what are relatively easy. Each person is usually happy to play his part because the goal is exciting and because the payoff is in profits and bonuses. (Which is something everyone can understand.)

But in an academic environment, taking on responsibility for a project is a more complicated affair. One big difference is that academia doesn’t view revenue growth and profit as clear and comprehensible goals. What is good for the president (good will and endowments) isn’t necessarily good for the head of the Law Department (who may be thinking about his standing in the legal community) or the associate professor in Criminology (who may be thinking about what he needs to get tenure).

So I did my best to address these interests indirectly. (It’s not a good idea to be blunt when talking about ulterior motives.) And by the end of the half-hour, I felt like we were all moving in the same direction.

The next step is for CJ to turn over files on our top candidates to the law professors and have them opine on which cases have the best chance of success.

I realize that making this work is going to take much more than simply my willingness to pay for everything. I’m going to have to make it work for everyone involved. And that, of course, must include the exoneration of one wrongly convicted person.

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Worth Reading

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Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin.- It is generally believed that people’s natural talents are what turn them into world-class performers. But, in fact, as this book shows, talent has virtually nothing to do with performance. True world-class performance is built over a long period of time using deliberate practice – i.e., zeroing in on the critical aspects of a skill with laser-sharp focus, practicing them repeatedly, and getting quality feedback. Colvin argues that, with the proper motivation, you, too, can use deliberate practice to improve in any field.

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Sunday, March 17, 2019, Delray Beach, Florida


From My Work-in-Progress Basket

So You Want to Be Happy?

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Start by doing this: Spend less time thinking.

“Homo sapiens” means thinking human. But for the great majority of our species’ development, we did very little serious thinking.  Most of our brain activity was directed toward survival.

You might think that a lifetime spent searching for grub worms and running from predators would be an unhappy one. The evidence, according to Yuval Arrari, writing in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity, suggests otherwise. Prehistoric man seems to have led a reasonably happy life, in part because he had very little time for thinking.

I remember reading about an experiment in England, where a group of volunteers went off to the woods and lived prehistorically. Their lives were very simple. They spent three or four hours a day hunting and gathering, and 20 to 21 hours sleeping. And what did these intrepid volunteers have to say about their experience? They said it was the happiest time of their lives!

There have been several significant studies on happiness in recent times, including the famous Harvard Study that spanned more than 70 years. Most of them came to the same conclusions:

* If you ask young people what they think will make them happy, they will name the usual suspects – wealth, fame success, etc.

* But when you study the actual data, it turns out that happiness comes from experiences rather than things and relationships rather than accomplishments.

These sorts of studies dovetail with the teachings of the Stoics and Transcendentalists and Buddhists. Their view was that wellbeing comes from living “in the moment” and not fretting about the future or the past.

It takes a fair amount of thinking about oneself to achieve success, acquire wealth, and/or become famous (when fame is the goal). But achieving happiness in life is mostly the result of caring about others and living in the moment, which is almost impossible to do when your mind is active with thought.

As someone that spends 98% of his waking day thinking about anything and everything other than what I’m actually doing, I could be a poster person for the deleterious effects of living in one’s head. My bouts of anxiety come, at least in part, from thinking frantically about the future. And dredging up thoughts of the past only exacerbates my bouts of depression.

I believe in the positive effects of meditation. The practice is meant to bring the mind away from transient thought and toward a more grounded state of consciousness – one in which your essential self somehow stops paying attention to the thoughts and feelings that race through the mind and focuses in on the present moment, in all its wonderfulness. But perhaps because I’ve spent so much time thinking, I find it difficult, if not impossible, to meditate in any serious way.

I don’t seem to have much trouble thinking and caring about others. I don’t do it naturally, but I can do it. And when I do it, my mood improves – sometimes into the happiness zone.

But it’s not just caring about others that stimulates a sense of wellbeing. I find contentment, too, whenever I’m working well on something I care about. A building project, for example, or landscaping my botanical garden or a writing a book or playing the French horn.

So what does that all mean?     READ MORE

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A Word to the Wise

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Bootstrap (noun, verb, adjective) – To bootstrap (BOOT-strap) is to rely entirely on your own efforts and resources, to help yourself succeed without the aid of others. As used by journalist David Sax: “Unlike in Europe, where serving is often a career rather than a backup plan, American table-waiting remains a bootstrap business, and some of the biggest skeptics of waiter training courses and schools are seasoned servers themselves.”

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