Old Men Worrying About the Future:
Three Predictions We Won’t Live to See 

I got into an email chat with my Myrtle Beach crew that got briefly serious. In a single afternoon, we covered the economic, political, and social future of our country. Plus overpopulation. Plus global warming.

I thought the conversation was brilliant. On every topic, the group differed, with about a third presenting a pessimistic view of the future, a third feeling optimistic, and a third admitting they had no idea. Lots of good points were made. But I’ll just give you my best recollection of what I said:

Global Warming

The globe may continue to warm for some time, and that may change our climate and our topography to a significant degree. But it won’t end the world. Nor will it end the presence of Homo sapiens. As the physical world changes, population densities and lifestyles will adapt, aided by technology that will allow human beings to continue to be an important part of Earth’s ecosystem for hundreds or thousands of years. Which is, even in my most forward-caring moments, all I can bring myself to worry about.

Overpopulation 

Our more urgent concerns were for our children and grandchildren, with overpopulation seen by many in the group to be a major issue. But for much of the world, and most of the developed world, populations are shrinking. And to my mind, that is going to be a bigger problem than overpopulation for our children and grandchildren – perhaps the most serious economic and cultural challenge they will face.

Life and Lifestyle in the Future

My feeling is that there is a 50% to 60% chance that we will nuke ourselves into oblivion in the next 10 to 20 years. If, however, we can avoid doing that, technological advances that are already underway (e.g., robotics and AI) will change the human experience drastically. The world will no longer be comprised of have and have-not countries. Hunger and abject poverty will be problems of the past, violent crime will be rare, and most other forms of crime will cease to exist.

But what will also cease to exist will be personal privacy and liberty.

This will happen because everyone on the planet will be monitored, 24/7, by ubiquitous cameras, microphones, and other sensors (including some embedded in their bodies) that will feed millions of bits of data about everything they do and say into remote monitoring systems that will provide the government (and who knows who else) with almost instantaneous reports on their actions, statements, and (quite possibly) even their thoughts.

Along with the disappearance of personal liberty and privacy, the appreciation of independent and especially contrarian forms of thinking will be gone. Humans will gradually and happily give up their freedom to be and think differently in return for comfort, safety, and predictability in their lives.

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What’s Going On with Me, You Ask? I’ll Tell You… I’m Fat! 

RJ, an old friend who recently reconnected with me, asked me to bring him up to date on my life. “What are you spending your time on?” he asked. “Are you still working or retired? How’s the body? And the mind? Give me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

After telling him how glad I was to be in contact with him again, I answered thusly:

“What’s going on with me? Let me start with the most important thing, RJ: I’m fat. Now, I’m not one of those people that say they are fat when their eight-pack turns into a six-pack. I have 15 to 20 pounds of blubber hanging on my bones, slowing me down, and increasing my blood pressure.

“So that’s number one.

“Second, third, and fourth, I’m dealing with a bunch of personal and business challenges that I doubt you’d be interested in.

“Fifth, for the first time in my life, I’m beginning to worry seriously about the direction of the world and what life is going to be like for my children and grandchildren.

“And finally, I’m fat. Oh, right… I already mentioned that.”

Then I thought… “Maybe I should write about this in my blog. I’ve written about my struggles with weight in the past, but maybe I should write about the new routine I’ve started that I’m excited about.”

I thought that was a pretty good idea. So that’s why you’re going to see it here now.

My new routine allows me to eat whatever and as much as I want – every day – and yet lose weight. So far, I’m averaging a pound a day. Which means that, if this continues, I’ll be back to fighting shape by the end of this month.

But before I tell you what it is, I’d like to share with you how, over the years, I have coped with those periods when I’ve draped a bath towel over the full-length mirror directly across from my shower and, if I ever found myself at the beach, had my beach towel tucked just beneath my chest so that onlookers could guess, but never know, how big my belly had grown.

My Psychological Approach: Switch-Hitting My Values

Whenever I’ve gone through one of those times, I’ve forced myself to think positively. I reminded myself that my physical appearance doesn’t matter. That what really matters is my family, my work, and whatever good I can do for other people. I told that to myself not just every morning, but every time I caught myself in profile passing a shop window.

And, of course, all of that is true.

So my vanity-based anxiety would recede. And I would begin to experience the true joy of being at peace with myself.

And when I lost the fat (which I always managed to do after wallowing in it for a year or so), I basked in my recovered body image with great jubilation, taking every chance to take off my shirt in front of strangers.

But that’s beside the point.

Here’s my new diet…

My Crazy New Eating Strategy

This diet is based on one that worked very well for me about 30 years ago. I combined it with the new information out there about the advantages of fasting, plus something I heard about a 50-year-old martial artist friend of mine who has always looked lean and muscular.

It’s simple. I eat only one meal a day. And I limit that meal to exactly 60 minutes.

I know how crazy this might sound. I know it contradicts the many other diets that advise eating lots of small meals throughout the day. It contradicts paleo diets, because I allow myself to eat all the carbs and artificial foods I care to. It even sort of contradicts the new fasting diets, which are based on having three meals a day but within restricted time limits.

I don’t know for sure the biological explanation for why it’s working. But I do know that eating once a day significantly limits the number of times per day my body will experience the ups and downs of insulin spikes that have always made me hungry a few hours after every meal (however healthy) and, when one of my meals was high in carbs, set off my metabolism so that it wanted to burn energy for fat, which meant my body would store more fat, even if the portions I was eating were small.

Actually, I think the main reason this diet is working for me is that it gives me another way to tap into the power of positive thinking. On this new diet, I no longer feel deprived. I no longer think about what I can’t eat. I don’t even have to think about how much I’m eating. I spend all my food-thinking energy imagining how I’m going to stuff my face during that one-hour period. How great it’s going to be to begin the meal with a cocktail, eat all the steak and mashed potatoes and gravy I can fit into my craw while drinking copious amounts of wine, end the meal with a pint of ice cream, and then, if there’s another five or ten minutes left, end the evening with a quick Cognac and a long-lasting cigar.

Not only is this diet working (so far), but since I started it, I have never felt a moment’s hunger. I’ve never wanted to grab a cookie when passing the cookie jar, and I’ve never gotten out of bed at 11:00 p.m. to raid the refrigerator.

I do drink a cup or two more coffee in the a.m. than I have in the past, and a glass or two of caffeinated diet cola in the afternoon. But I’m never pining for food. It’s 4:00 p.m. as I write this. We are having dinner at 6:00. I’m starting to think happily about what I’m going to eat, but I’m not pining.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress…

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A Good Example of Bad Science 

Early in the COVID-19 breakout, I caught the bug from a young’un I was rassling, and then passed it on to PB, one of my trainers.

PB is in his fifties. He’s scrupulous about staying in shape, and looks like he’s 40. He is also a committed vegan, which gives us something to good-naturedly spar about.

PB had a terrible time with the virus. He was in bed for a week, and unable to work for another two. My experience was considerably better. I spent a fairly miserable 24 hours in bed, but woke up the following day feeling A-OK and was able to resume my normal schedule.

I felt sure that my much easier bout with the virus must have felt comically unjust to PB. Why would he, with his optimum health habits and scrupulously nurtured biosystem, have suffered so greatly, while I, a tequila-drinking, cigar-chomping, meat-eater 20 years older than he, beat it so quickly!

To make him feel a little better, I said, “It makes sense. Imagine when that tiny little COVID virus dropped into the lush, green fields of your unsullied bloodstream. What a paradise the little feller discovered! Now imagine an equally fragile little bug falling into my biosystem, a steaming swamp of meat fat and alcohol, struggling to stay alive while sudden gusts of toxic cigar smoke surround him. He had to be thinking, ‘I’ve got to get the hell out of here! And fast!’”

That Was Then and This Is Now: To Watch or Not to Watch 

I’m reminded of that now because after my last training session with PB, he recommended a movie to me, a four-part documentary titled You Are What You Eat. It is based, he told me, on a study comparing vegan and omnivorous diets. And since he was recommending it, I didn’t have to ask him which one proved out to be better.

Knowing that PB was earnestly trying to help me with my diet, just as he helps me with my exercise and my physical therapy, I told him I would watch it. But I also told him that I was willing to bet that the study was flawed, if not outright rigged.

And then, I think it was the very next day, I read a review of You Are What You Eat by one of my favorite health journalists, Peter Attia.

Attia begins with this:

“The investigators behind this research (and docuseries) claim that their study design – which involves the use of identical twins to control for genetic factors – has allowed them ‘to investigate metabolism in a very comprehensive way,’ including effects of the respective diets on cardiovascular and metabolic health. So how well did the study accomplish that goal? And what can we take away from the results?”

You can read the rest of Attia’s review here.

And you can watch the four-part documentary on Netflix here.

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Another Reason to Support the War in Ukraine

I just found out. The military-industrial complex has come up with a new reason Americans should support Ukraine in its war with Russia: It’s good for the US economy!

I learned this while listening to the radio last week. According to whatever numbskull was speaking, industrial production in the US defense and space sector has increased almost 18% since Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago. And that’s why Biden’s new “supplemental defense bill” should be supported by every congressperson – even those Trump-supporting crackpots that don’t think we should be supporting another Cold War proxy contest.

Here’s how they explain it: Out of the $95 billion the bill’s sponsors are asking for, 65% – about $61 billion – will flow back to the US by way of paying for US-manufactured military products.

That’s good, right?

Of course, there is the inconvenient fact that 100% of the $95 billion will be 100% funded by adding to the federal debt (already at a mind-boggling and record-breaking $33 trillion). And 100% of that will be paid back – either by inflation or recession (more likely both) – by American taxpayers, most of whom couldn’t find Ukraine on a map.

If you care to read more about the bill, US spending, and the political arguments, here’s a piece from the WSJ that was published on Feb. 18.

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Five Contrarian Truths About Behavior Modification

I’ve been thinking about a thesis I cooked up about a year ago, which, if it continues to feel valid as I write about it, will become a book.

The thought is this: We (as individuals and citizens and as members of social organizations and religious groups) spend a not insignificant amount of our time, energy, and money trying to improve the world by improving people who have tendencies and habits we judge to be unhealthy, unwanted, and/ or destructive.

Just in terms of well-known national and international organizations, we have a plethora of programs for alcoholics, drug addicts, and overeaters, plus anger management programs, dozens of programs whose purpose is to prevent criminal recidivism, and even programs for people that are addicted to sex.

This would make sense if these programs worked – if they were largely successful in effecting the desired change. But most of them are not.

Take, for example, programs for treating drug and alcohol addiction. The success rate is very low. So low that it is difficult to find the numbers, because the organizations that make their money running such programs don’t want the public to know how unsuccessful they are.

If you spend several hours digging and verifying the numbers you are able to find, you will discover that the 12-month success rate for alcohol and drug rehabilitation is about 15%. Put differently, drug and alcohol recovery organizations fail in achieving their goals at a rate of about 85%.

The War on Poverty, started by President Johnson in 1964, was a massive government initiative of more than 40 individual programs. There are plenty of phony ways to measure the success of that program that show positive results. However, if you look at the only metric that is honest – the “absolute poverty line” (the threshold below which families have insufficient income to provide the food, shelter, and clothing needed to preserve health – the rate has fallen insignificantly: from 10.5% in 1966 to 10.1% today.

The War on Drugs, started by President Nixon in 1971, is another big one. In June 2011, the Global Commission on Drug Policy released a critical report, declaring: “The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.” In 2015, the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for an end to the war on drugs, estimated that the US spends $51 billion annually on the effort to stop illegal drug use. In 2021, after 50 years, others have estimated that the US has spent a cumulative $1 trillion on it.

The result? More Americans are taking illegal drugs than ever before, and the number of Americans incarcerated for illegal drug use has risen 500% since 1971.

Question: Is there anything that you would commit your time and money to if you knew the failure rate was that high?

It’s said that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. You can attempt to open a locked door by continuously slamming your head into it. But if, after your first attempt, the door stays firmly shut, slamming your head into it even harder makes no sense.

You would have to be an absolute idiot to believe that if we kept on with the same enormously expensive programs, they would one day achieve their goals. Yet that is exactly what we have been doing… for more than 80 years!

The reason is simple: the irrational but persistent belief that we – as individuals or organizations – can change (improve) unfavorable behaviors of people to any meaningful degree.

I believe there is a better way to deal with the massive failure rate of these programs. And that is to give up, once and for all, the false belief that, in a free country, anyone other than the sovereign individual can change his or her behavior.

Here are a few axioms to consider:

1. When it comes to character flaws, negative temperament, and bad habits, adult Homo sapiens seem to be almost incapable of change. Whether the issue is drug or alcohol addiction, overeating, leaving the toilet seat up, or general grouchiness, the percentage of people that successfully and permanently change are few and far between. Despite this obvious fact, most people, including educated people, refuse to believe that other people can’t change.

2. Trying to beat the odds by scolding or cajoling someone into changing their ways does no good at all. On the contrary, it usually has two bad results: It reduces the very slim chance that the person you are trying to change will change. And it creates a void between the two of you that is almost always filled with lying, anger, and resentment.

3. If you love the people in your life in whom you want to see change, begin by asking yourself if you would feel better if your relationships with them got worse or ended. Because that is, again, the most likely outcome of trying to change them.

4. If the answer to the above question is no – i.e., that you would not like to further damage or destroy your relationships with people you care about – the only reasonable thing to do is accept those things you don’t like about them. And even – if those things are annoying rather than damaging (to you or to them) – find a way to enjoy them.

5. If the behavior you want to see changed is damaging and destructive (to one or both of you), the only thing you can do is end the relationship gently but firmly. You must say goodbye. And you must mean it.

I know how futile and possibly depressing this may sound. But I’ve found that letting go of the mythology of change is very positive. I’ll talk more about that next week.

It’s a Serious, Scientific Catalog. So… Is This a Joke?

I was paging through one of my catalogs on trees this morning and I came across this entry for Woman’s Tongue Tree (Albizia lebbeck), otherwise known as East Indian Walnut: “This tree is well known for producing an abundance of long, brittle pods containing small seeds which, when driven by a light breeze, rattle endlessly. What connection this might have with a woman’s tongue is not clear.”

Aging Anecdotes: Forgot Your ID? 

AS writes to say: “I was making a purchase today and the 50-something clerk asked me for ID. I didn’t have my license on me and told him so. Then I said, ‘What do you think could possibly have happened to me in my life that I could look like this and still not be 21?’ He took another look at me and said, ‘All right, forget it.’”

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Five Contrary Truths I Learned Too Late in My Life. 
If You Are Younger Than 73, You Can Be Five Steps Ahead of Me!

I’ve spent what probably amounts to an unhealthy amount of my spare time trying to figure out why so much of life is difficult or weird or crazy. I’ve spent an equal amount of time trying to figure out how I could get more of what I need (these days, mostly peace of mind) out of what I’ve got (mostly relationships).

I’ve got dozens, if not hundreds, of these thoughts filed away in the recesses of my aging mind. And I keep thinking that some of them might be helpful to one or several of my readers. So, before they flee completely from my cobwebbed memory banks, I thought I’d put them down here in my blog post – perhaps four or five at a time.

These first five are connected in some ways – but whatever connection they have, I’ve already forgotten. So, please take them as individual observations, and decide for yourself if they make sense to you.

1. Equal opportunity and equal treatment under the law are worthy and achievable goals for a civilized society. But believing that equality is a natural or divine law of some kind is foolish and destructive. Equality – true equality – is a rare and momentary anomaly. And that is because the universe, including all its elements, all its forces, and all its creatures, is designed to move relentlessly towards inequality. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is just one of innumerable observations that scientists and philosophers have made about this fact.

2. Equity – the objective of achieving equal outcomes in terms of education, income, scientific or artistic achievement, etc. – is a goal that will always result in communal degradation and can be achieved only by theft and the threat of violence. And even then, it cannot last, because it is based on equality. (See above.)

3. If the universe has any meaning, it is ironic – that life is a joke laughing at itself. All the best art and music is, happily or sadly, acceptingly or in anguish, a recognition of the fundamental irony of life and living.

4. The quality of our lives is largely determined by what we pay attention to. The more we focus our attention outside ourselves, the greater our sense of accomplishment and well-being. The more we focus our attention on ourselves, the greater our unhappiness, including ennui, neuroticism, and depression.

5. Every truth about life has an equal and opposite truth. Including the four above.

Have You Heard of Swatting? It’s Not Good. And It’s Becoming More Common.

Last week, Judge Tanya Chutkan found out what “swatting” means after an anonymous caller told her local police precinct that there was a shooting at her Washington home. Officers arrived at her home shortly thereafter to find that the call was bogus. No shooting had taken place. Two weeks earlier, federal marshals had rushed to special counsel Jack Smith’s home in Maryland where, they found out, there had been no shooting.

Swatting has emerged in recent years as a method of harassing and intimidating public figures,
and political targets have been bipartisan. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene claims to have been swatted several times. And in 2022, Judge Emmet Sullivan, who was presiding over the trial of a Jan. 6. rioter, also seems to have been swatted.

The danger with swatting political figures is not just the unnecessary diversion of emergency resources, but the physical risk any confrontation with law enforcement poses to victims and police.

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Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately 

White Privilege, Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, Identity Politics… How Academia’s Dumbest Ideas Became So Popular 
 
I had just finished a chapter of a book I’m writing in which, among other things, I consider why so many of the most popular ideas and ideologies being propounded in colleges and universities today are not just wrong, but downright stupid.

White Privilege, intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, identity politics, etc. – I’ve written about all of them here before, wondering how they could be so obviously nonsensical and yet so strongly promoted and consumed.

I was thinking about it again last week after watching the clown show that took place during the Congressional hearings on the pro-Palestinian protests at many of our most prestigious universities. I was trying to understand how the presumably intelligent presidents of Harvard, MIT, and U Penn – people who were all about student behavior codes that banned such “microaggressions” as using misgendered pronouns – could publicly defend student protesters that repeatedly called for the extinction of the Jewish state?

How could they be so dumb on both issues at the same time?

Moreover, how could all those pro-Palestinian student protesters believe their cause was right? That the largest genocide of Jews since the Holocaust was a legitimate “act of resistance” against an oppressive, colonialist, racist, and apartheid state of White supremacy?

Even more disturbingly, why did the media portray them in a positive light?

I have not yet developed a theory that feels complete, much less defensible. But here is what I’m thinking.

A college professor can have a splendid career at an “ordinary” college by being an excellent teacher as well as an actual expert in the subject he or she teaches

My father, who was an exceptionally learned man, is an example. His dream was to be a playwright. But after writing several plays that were not commercially successful, he accepted the fact that, to support a family (that would soon include eight children), he had to get a “real” job. So, he became a professor of English, Greek, and Latin Literature at a local college on Long Island. He earned his living that way, supplemented by side gigs teaching mathematics and “speed” reading, for his entire career. He knew his Shakespeare and Homer and Joyce. He was also a very good teacher – so good that his classes were always maxed out early in the registration process.

His considerable skills would have been insufficient to get him tenure had he been teaching at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. At those lofty institutions, success requires not just expertise, but the continuous production of scholarly papers and books that would demonstrate his bona fides.

In other words, he would have had to play the “publish or perish” game.

And here’s where we get into the question of how highly educated people can end up embracing stupid ideas.

Professors at prestige universities must write books and essays that are published by academic publishers. But academic publishers – and this is true to some extent of all nonfiction publishers – are reluctant to spend money on books that, however solid they may be in terms of research, are unlikely to get attention. Books that get attention draw attention to the publishers themselves. And that means growth, prestige, and profits.

So, if the goal of the professor/writer is limited to merely being edifying, there is no natural incentive to propose theses that are unable to get lots of attention.

In theory, academic publishers should be satisfied with books that correct some minor technical flaws in the accepted scholarly literature, the idea being that scholarship is advanced by strengthening and extending widely respected theories. (Scholarly research and writing was always thought to be a scrupulous and humble pastime.)

But however successful books like that may be at inching forward towards a deeper understanding of some esoteric subject, they will receive, at best, approval and praise from other scholars that are unknown to the larger world.

If modern scholars want to make a “splash” – if they want to propel their careers forward – they have to write something that, in some way, is bold and ambitious. Put differently, they must challenge or refute, in whole or in part, the accepted wisdom of the day.

It’s not easy to overturn or reinvent or even reshape ideas that have dominated a field of study. Standard academic ideas are standard for a good reason: They have resisted critical challenges time and time again, sometimes for centuries.

Faced with the task of coming up with an idea that is different, it’s nearly impossible for a modern scholar to resist the temptation to compose, instead, one that is simply new. An idea that is, however flawed, nonetheless exciting, superficially cogent, and, most importantly, appealing in some way to the current gestalt of the larger academic community.

Such ideas are not only attractive to academic publishers, they are attractive to the scholars that critique them in academic journals because they, too, are under pressure to have something new to write about.

They are all looking for ideas that are fresh but not flat-out nonsensical, newish and clever, but also supportive of the academic vibe of the time. These are the ideas that are endorsed and embraced.

So what academia gets, with every new generation of scholars and critics, is a set of “new” ideas that may be flawed, but at least have the benefit of seeming to be reasonable given the cultural prejudices of the day. And though they may have lost any relationship to logic, fact, or common sense, they are eventually accepted as “true.”

Fifty years ago, any academic that wrote a book promoting any of the crazy ideas out there today would have never seen that book in print.

The idea of White Privilege, for example, could not have become accepted were it not for Karl Marx’s idea, 100 years ago, that Capitalism and class conflict were the fundamental reasons for the unequal distribution of wealth. And the current ideas of intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, and identity politics could never have been taken seriously were it not for Marx’s illogical and false theories that power and class conflict were the root causes of inequality.

That is the situation we have today. The dominant social, political, and economic ideas embraced by elitist educational institutions are obviously and evidently ridiculous. But for those enclosed in academic echo chambers and social media algorithms, they seem not just perfectly reasonable, but virtuous and good.

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“I Am 17 and I Don’t Know Where to Go with My Life”

I frequently get requests from my readers asking for advice, and I do my best to answer their questions and get them pointed in the right direction. Sometimes, much to my surprise, the requests come from young people who have read my books. For example, this one from JC, who wrote after reading Ready, Fire, Aim:

“I am 17 and I don’t know where to go with my life. I was thinking about going into sales because I want to learn a skill. Since you are an expert, I wanted to know what your insight would be. Any help would be appreciated.”

This is what I told him… 

The best thing you have going for you, JC, is that you are only 17 and you’ve already proven your ambition by taking the initiative to write to me. In my opinion, ambition + proactivity = 50% of success. So, you already have half of what you need to achieve your business and financial goals.

The other half is a combination of knowledge and skill.

By knowledge, I mean discovering the key elements that undergird all entrepreneurial businesses, which is exactly what Ready, Fire, Aim was written to explain.

And by skill, I mean the three essential skills of entrepreneurial success:

* Knowing how to sell products and services, generally and in the specific industry you work in
* Knowing how to safely and intelligently grow any entrepreneurial business
* Knowing how to create and manage healthy and sustainable profits

Smart You!

There is no bigger advantage to achieving significant goals than starting young. Not only do you have unlimited energy and perhaps the sharpest mind you will ever have, you also have decades of time. You have the time to learn the fundamental skills that will make you competent and comfortable in every situation and against every challenge you will face in the future. You have the time to decide, at any point, that the path you are on is not right. And you have the time to start over.

Lucky You! 

There are many ways to become wealthy and successful. So if you begin your journey without a particular profession or business in mind, as seems to be the case with you, don’t fret about it. You have a BIG advantage over someone that wants to be, for example, a successful doctor or software technician or CEO in a particular industry. Because you haven’t locked yourself into a niche, you are free to choose a path that – depending on the skill sets you have now – will be the fastest and easiest to get you where you want to go.

What Should You Do First? 

I’ve never been comfortable with the idea that goals – any goals – should be undertaken one step at a time. The moment I decided that I wanted to be financially successful, I could see that there were a half-dozen things I needed to do, and I needed to start doing all of them immediately.

Suggestion #1. At this point, you are not sure what profession or business you want to become a part of. And, as I said, that is to your advantage. Because what you must start doing immediately is learn the fundamentals of how all businesses work. Not just by reading Ready, Fire, Aim, but by treating it as a reference that you refer to daily.

Suggestion #2. Take a sales job. Any sales job. Every successful entrepreneur I know spent at least a year or two in his/her youth selling products and services directly – either by phone or door-to-door, in a retail office or on a car lot. There is nothing that will teach you how to sell anything better and faster than simply doing it. No book or manual can come close. And don’t be afraid to move around a bit from one type of sales job to another. To truly master the skill of selling, you have to have experience with soft selling (as you would be doing in a retail store) and hard selling (on the phone or door-to-door).

Suggestion #3. Once you become comfortable with your selling chops, make the move to become head of sales, either in the company you are working for or another one. Running a sales department requires essential skills that you won’t get by being one of the salespeople. Heading a sales team will teach you how to manage, monitor and, most of all, motivate salespeople. And that is an enormously important skill that you must learn if you want to get to the top of whatever industry you eventually land in.

These three suggestions will get you started. There will be other skills you will need to develop as you move closer to your ultimate goals. But for now, since you are just starting out, this will be more than enough to focus on.

Oh, and One Other Thing… 

While you are working full-time at various jobs to develop your selling and sales management skills, don’t neglect your general education. If you choose not to go to college, you should nevertheless spend several hours a day taking online courses that will provide you with the knowledge and intellectual sophistication you will need in order to wisely spend the wealth you will eventually acquire.

 

Worth Considering

The Continuing Mystery of Ray Epps, Sr. 

On Jan. 5, the man pictured above was videotaped energetically encouraging Trump supporters to storm the Capitol. The next day, in the midst of the chaos outside the Capitol building, he was videotaped asking law enforcement officers how he could help them.

This got Tucker Carlson and some other conservative commentators wondering: Who was this guy? And what the heck was he doing? Was he bipolar? Or could he be working for the Feds, provoking the crowd to enter the Capitol?

For months, they asked: Who is that mystery man? And why wasn’t he among the 1,000+ Jan. 6 protestors that were suspected of criminal activity, identified, and arrested? For months, there were no answers. And then, finally, he was named: Ray Epps, Sr., a 60-something ex-Marine who, when questioned before the now-defunct House Select Committee, said that he wasn’t a federal agent and wasn’t working for the CIA, the National Security Agency, or the Metropolitan Police Dept.

What he couldn’t explain was his strange behavior.

Since then, more than 700 Jan. 6 protesters have been charged with various crimes, with more than half of them convicted. Most of those that had done nothing more than be photographed at the scene received sentences of several months. But the sentences of some who were involved in the planning and execution of the protest were severe.

Stewart Rhodes, a Yale graduate and military veteran who was convicted of planning the protest, received 18 years in prison for “seditious conspiracy.” Peter Schwartz, who was accused of throwing a chair at a group of policemen and then pepper-spraying them, got a 14-year sentence. And Thomas Webster, a retired New York City police officer, got 10 years for tackling a DC officer and grabbing his gas mask.

The most-publicized protestor, of course, was Jacob Chansley, who wasn’t accused of assaulting law enforcement or destroying property. He was sentenced to 41 months in jail for, apparently, simply being inside the Capitol Building, shirtless and wearing a headdress.

So, what do I think about the whole Ray Epps thing?

It might be the biggest political farce of the last 10 years, and we have had plenty of those. In terms of facts and common sense, his testimony and the government’s stated position on him and his story have the intellectual solidity of gender fluidity theory.

I still have questions.

Why, after the contradictory videos of him went viral, weren’t the FBI, the CIA , and the Metropolitan police, who had thousands and thousands of images of all the protestors that day, able to identify him?

And then why, when he was identified, did it take so long for the police to charge him?

And then why, after he was arrested, did the Justice Department make a special plea to the court for how they felt he should be treated?

Could it be that they were afraid that if he got a much stiffer sentence, five or 10 years, for example, he might start talking?

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Boys Will Be Boys 

I was backing up. I would have fallen over the barbell on the floor behind me had Paulo, my trainer, not stopped me.

I asked him, “As a kid, in Brazil, did you ever play that prank where you keep backing someone up until he falls over another guy who’s on all fours behind him?”

He had. It was common practice.

“In Brazil, too,” I said. “That’s funny.”

He asked, “Did you ever do that thing where you hyperventilate for a few seconds and then one of your friends gives you a bearhug till you pass out?”

“We did that,” I admitted.

“There must be other dumb and dangerous things that all boys do,” I said.

“Like jumping from a bridge when you don’t know how deep the water is below?”

“Exactly.”

“What the hell were we thinking?” we wondered.

My guess: We weren’t thinking at all. We were playing the kind of games that adolescent boys have been playing for hundreds – even thousands – of years. Stupid, semi-dangerous descendants of ancient coming-to-manhood rituals that have been practiced since Homo sapiens became sapient.

Becoming a man originally meant learning how to participate in dangerous things like hunting and warfare. It required not just bravery, but fierce loyalty to the clan – and, thus, to the survival of the species.

Girls must always have had coming-to-womanhood rituals. Note to self: Find out what they were.

 

Loving, Loyalty, and Pragmatism 

I came across this the other day: According to research by Dr. Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist from Stanford University (as well as numerous other studies), women initiate more than 70% of all divorces.

That surprised me. Maybe it shouldn’t have. Does it surprise you?

I did a bit of digging and found other facts about women vs. men in matters of marriage and divorce. For example:

* Did you know that, after the divorce, women move on to other relationships much faster than men? I didn’t.

* And how about this? According to several reports, women are more likely than men to have love partners before the divorce. It not only surprised me, it reminded me of a story I heard about a colleague of mine: By the time she told her husband she was divorcing him, she had already purchased a house for herself and her until-then-secret boyfriend!

* Here’s another thing I discovered: According to one survey, 98.7% of women surveyed a year after being divorced said their lives were “better” or “much better” than they were while married.

I’ve been thinking about why I was surprised by these facts. I suspect it’s because I’ve always assumed that women are naturally more loving and loyal than men, whereas men are naturally more pragmatic than women. I guess I’m going to have to rethink those assumptions.

And here’s something that any young man planning on playing house-husband in an upcoming marriage should know: According to a University of Chicago study, when women earn as much as or more than their husbands, the marriages are 50% more likely to end in divorce.

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Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately: 
Does Personal vs. Political Hypocrisy Matter? 

I’ve noticed that there is often a gulf between the political and the personal when it comes to theories about what is right and wrong.

And a parallel difference in what people believe about how governments should solve problems and how they solve these same problems in their own lives.

I’m not exempt.

For example, I am theoretically opposed to everything about Communism, including the massive and authoritarian distribution of wealth. The idea is so obviously idiotic, it seems to me, that I shouldn’t have to provide historical examples to prove how destructive it is.

Yet, in my personal life, it is not infrequent that I find myself giving cash and other sorts of financial assistance to people to help them achieve or acquire something sensible and helpful to them.

In doing this, I recognize the hypocrisy. But I repress my internal critic because I enjoy the experience. And, after all, it’s my own money. I can do what I want with it!

Over decades of giving away money this way (privately and personally as opposed to contributing to charities that I control), I have developed some “rules” I try to follow to mitigate the many forms of damage that giving people “free” money creates:

* I don’t give money to anyone that asks for it. The idea here is that I consider asking for money to be a moral flaw. That’s my rule. I do break it from time to time.

* I attach zero expectations to my gift. The moment it goes from my hand or bank account to the other person, the transaction is finished. And I have no interest in knowing if the recipient did with it what they said they would do. The pleasure is in giving the money. Finding out later that I was bamboozled or the person I had hopes for failed will only bring me unhappiness.

* I do expect a thank-you. And a sincere one. As GG, a Zen master and friend of mine once said, “Gratitude is what nature demands from a gift. Without it, the exchange is unbalanced. That said, I prefer thank-yous that are short and sweet. If they are longwinded or groveling, they are embarrassing.

Interestingly, these rules are pretty much the opposite of the rules my family and I have established for FunLimón, our community development center in Nicaragua.

There, we:

* Give financial assistance only to people who are willing to not just ask for help but ask for it formally and provide justification for what they want.

* Make it clear that when they get or borrow money from FunLimón, they accept the obligations that come with it, including, in some cases, paying it back (with or without interest), paying it back in labor, or “passing it forward” in the future.

* Require recipients of our financial aid to keep us posted on their use of our funds and meet certain requirements as they spend the money.

* Demand a formal thank-you, because we believe that saying thank you is a moral obligation.

So, that’s how I – a diehard free market/ Libertarian thinker – commit hypocrisy.

My left-leaning (and outright Socialist) friends are hypocritical in the opposite way.

They believe deeply in the redistribution of wealth – so long as it is the government or someone else that is paying for it. Ask them to contribute their “fair share” of the cost of whatever redistribution of wealth they are advocating, and they’ll tell you that they pay taxes… and, anyway, they are strapped for cash. “Let the one-percenters pay for it,” they say, looking me up and down.

Here is a funny video clip that demonstrates this.

This clip is about letting illegals stay in their homes. Watch till he asks if they could take in a migrant.

The point is that there is very often a gulf between our political/ social/ economic views on how companies or countries should redistribute wealth and what we do as private citizens with our families, our friends, and even strangers.

I don’t know if there is an “answer” to this contradiction. I justify my hypocrisy (in redistributing my own wealth to needy people) by pointing out that the money I’m giving away is my money. Even Ayn Rand would admit that there is nothing about free-market Capitalism that prohibits private charity.

On the other hand, I can’t think of a good justification for the hypocrisy of the Left. Can you?

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