Truth In Talking: Calling Things By the Right Name

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I’m going to quote Confucius, something I’d never have done were it not for TAA friend Shaula Evans:

“A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot.

Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.”  [Via Wikipedia]

                         Confucius, Analects, Book XIII, Chapter 3, verses 4-7, translated by James Legge

When “language is not in accordance with the truth of things,” music does not flourish. (Neither do presidential campaigns). It seems rather clear and direct; and hard to argue with. Shouldn’t we all strive to speak the truth?

Exaggeration is nothing new. But Confucius is talking about a good deal more than hyperbole here.  He’s talking about a moral perspective on the way we conduct our social lives.

What would Confucius say about a few aspects of modern life?

The Cops and the TSA

Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) writes in Forbes that the TSA people who screen you in airports have gotten an upgrade in terms of uniform, badges, and title.  They look a lot more like Federal Law Enforcement officials.

However, says Rep. Blackburn, they’re still being recruited from pizza boxes, and are not being given federal law enforcement training. What you see is not what you get.

Rep. Blackburn didn’t cite Confucius, but she might well have: this is a case where “language is not in accordance with the truth of things.”

Does it matter? It does, Blackburn says, because the “language” of a Federal Law Enforcement uniform commands respect. But if a loosely-recruited TSA employee uses that uniform to get a woman to halt, and then sexually assaults her – well, there’s your harm. It matters greatly.

Confucius and Facebook Friends

At least twelve billion people have pointed out that Facebook “friends” are not quite the same as “real” friends. It’s obvious, right?

Well, when something becomes so “obvious” that we no longer comment on it, you might say it’s entered our subconscious. We still talk about real “friends,” and we still have Facebook friends.

The fact that it’s in-your-face obvious and mind-numbingly common doesn’t alter the Confucian fact that “the language is not in accordance with the truth of things.” It’s not. We are using one word to describe two very different realities.

In Confucian terms, when we speak in this double-speak manner, we are not behaving as “superior men.” If the shoe fits…

Confucius Meets Business Best Practices

Expectations.  One of the more common mundanities of management is the exhortation to “always exceed expectations.” This is – let’s be clear – considered a good thing according to the canons of management.

In other words, we should lead people to expect one thing – and then surprise ‘em by giving them something else. Again, this is considered a good thing.

Except by Confucius, who reminds us that this is a rather clear-cut case of “the language not being in accordance with the truth of things.” Indeed, the whole point of this ‘best practice’ is to intentionally do the opposite of what Confucius suggests.

Public Relations.  What would Confucius make of the public relations industry? According to the Encyclopedia of Business Dictionary:

“The point of public relations is to make the public think favorably about the company and its offerings.”

Perhaps the PRSA (the industry association) doesn’t care for language that so easily suggests manipulation.

The Arthur Page Society, “a select membership organization for senior public relations and corporate communications executives who seek to enrich and strengthen their profession” almost certainly doesn’t like it. Their first of seven principles of public relations is, “tell the truth.”

Well, which is it? Is the purpose of public relations to “tell the truth?” Or to “make the public think favorably about the company?”

Confucianism, like the Arthur Page Society, likes to emphasize the normative aspect of things. The truth of things, they both might say, should accord with the ideal meaning of “Public Relations.” And presumably the Page society strives mightily to bring that goal about.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the one in which the Encyclopedia of Business tries to make sense of common-language usage for the ordinary businessman, the ‘truth’ is “we want you to think of us this way.”

Let’s be honest about that: because that is the fact on the ground, and it’s known and understood by any man on the street. To deny that is to speak language not in accordance with the truth of things.

Confucius and Trust

I am no Confucian scholar. To be more in accord with the truth of things, I am ignorant of Confucian teachings. He may have written on trust, and I don’t know of it.

But any of us can plainly see the eloquence and truth of his words to us, written 2500 years ago. There is a place in life for exaggeration and hyperbole. That place encompasses art and literature, inspiration and motivation. In that context, it is good.

But if we fail to keep our social and commercial interactions grounded in fundamental notions of honesty and candor – if we let our language stray from the truth of things – the music does not flourish. Nor do we, along with it.

Social Media, Reputation, and Trust

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THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN Raintoday.com 

Social media is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they foster depersonalized, surface interactions that can erode trust. Yet the same breadth of interaction can leverage reputation gains. The key to managing social media for trust and reputation does not lie in trade-offs or in risk management, but in applying some simple values and principles.

Social Media and Trust Erosion

We’ve all made jokes about the erosion of terms like ‘friends,’ and the hollowness of ‘following’ tens of thousands of tweeters. It is possible to be a huge fan of social media (I certainly am) and still raise a giant eyebrow at some of the ironies it reveals.

For one thing, there is the tendency of lowest-common denominator crass commercialism to overwhelm any new form of social media. We’ll all see whether Google’s decision to start Google+ without commerce gave it a head start of a different sort—or not.

At a personal level, something similar pans out. All new media seem to bring out a gold rush of number collectors. (Interestingly, FourSquare recognized this drive and made it central to its “mayor of…” concept).

The combined commercial and personal drives to conquer quickly erode the personal-ness that many social media users initially found attractive. A thousand corporate entities asking you to be their friend doesn’t induce trust.

And the stakes are being raised. As search engine optimization (SEO) became critical, Google attacked the so-called “content farms.” But the content farmers have raised their game. There are now automated programs trained to “create content” by combining key words into common grammatical constructs, and then using synonyms in new combinations to create hundreds of “distinct” articles and blogposts and “news” stories—all to get higher rankings for keywords.

In other words, the monkeys are jumping on typewriters in a very organized manner—to make you think you’re reading something real. When content itself becomes stripped of meaning, there is a real assault on trust.

Social Media: The Trust and Reputation Upside

At the same time that social media can lower trust, the fact of that lowered trust increases the opportunity for differentiation. If you become less and less trustworthy, and I don’t change at all, then I begin to look more trustworthy—at no particular cost to myself.

Not that many years ago, the rule of thumb was that a customer’s good experience would be repeated to a half dozen or so people, while a customer’s bad experience would be shared with multiples more. In the social media world of today, you might add three zeroes to each of those numbers.

And while we usually focus on the risks of bad experiences, we forget the also-considerable value of thousands of favorable comparisons—with no risk taken whatsoever.

The fact is, as companies and people reveal themselves to be (pick your preferred adjective: shallow, commercial, selfish, disingenuous, etc.), those who benefit are those who remain (pick your adjective: deep, personal, other-focused, sincere, etc.).

At least, that is, if people retain the ability to tell the difference. I suspect they will.

The Relationship Between Trust and Reputation

Aristotle said, “Excellence is but a habit,” the repeated doing of the excellent thing. Similarly, I’d suggest that reputation is the repeated personal experience of trust—or of its absence. We don’t trust companies (with the exception of reliability or track records); we trust the people with whom we interact. Or we do not.

This view of reputation suggests it is best achieved as a byproduct of trust; specifically, as a byproduct of acting in a consistently trustworthy manner. By this view, trust drives reputation—not the other way around.

Also by this view, the best way to manage reputation through social media is not by attempting to harness the “power” of social media in service to a “good” message. The method inevitably swamps the message.

Any social media attempt at mass-scale communication, or at mass-produced content, is doomed by its nature to appear impersonal at best, and crassly selfish at worst. It cannot create personal trust. And thus it cannot be a good foundation for reputation.

Reputation Management

Trust-based reputation—the only kind with staying power—comes from a consistent customer experience (ditto for the employee experience). If that experience is to be one of trust, then the people engaged in all aspects of the company, including social media, must behave in trustworthy ways. A quick list of such virtues includes:

Truth-telling, candor, honesty, a disinclination to blame, an ability to confront difficult issues, sensitivity to the needs of others, a relationship rather than a transactional mentality, the ability to defer gratification, reliability, self-confidence, competence.

Some of these can be hired for, some can be trained for. They largely can’t be gotten through reliance on business process design, incentive systems, communications programs, or policies.

Instead, they are best developed through the tools of leadership, corporate cultures, and values. Indeed, those methods are far better suited to the flexible needs of future organizations. This is as true for social media as it is for any other part of the organization.

The lesson is not to avoid social media; you are nowhere in the future if you are not online and in the cloud. But also beware of metrics that have become disengaged from the things they were meant to measure; of ‘best practices’ that are based on reach and volume.

The power of social media, for those willing to see it, lies in making the world more personal, not less so. You do that by simply behaving personally in a trustworthy manner, online as in everywhere else. Your reputation will rise in comparison to those who don’t.

Can Income Inequality and Business Trust Co-exist?

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THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN Forbes.com

For four decades now, social trust has declined. This may seem like a minor matter, but a modern economy requires ever-greater levels of trust to function well. Both OWS and the Tea Party are evidence that such trust is lacking.

A leading cause of declining trust is income inequality. And despite the problem worsening, no one in business or politics appears willing to touch it. Too bad for us all.

Defining and Measuring Trust

When businesspeople hear, “Trust in business is down,” most think of corporate trustworthiness or reputation management. When academics talk about trust, most think about the propensity of people to believe in the good intentions of strangers. One is about being trusted; the other is about trusting.

Those two perspectives collide around the issue of income inequality. Dr. Eric Uslaner, a trust expert from academia, explains that income inequality is a leading cause of declining business trust – it drives people to be less trusting.

Most businesspeople don’t want to hear that, preferring to believe that trust can be addressed by public relations and changed corporate behavior – that is, via the appearance and reality of corporate trustworthiness.

Simply put: can “good” corporate behavior generate enough trust to overcome income inequality? Or are such attempts doomed without fundamental change?

The Data on Trusting

The General Social Survey has been conducted in the US since 1972 by the National Opinion Research Center. It has always contained questions about the inclination to attribute good intentions to strangers; in short, the propensity to trust.

The general drift of trusting-ness is very slow, but also clearly downward since 1972 in the US. It is not whipsawed by current events, but in the long run is affected by a steady drip.

In academics’ use of the GSS and other surveys, two linkages stand out:

  1. At the individual level, nothing increases the propensity to trust more than educational attainment;
  2. At the societal level, the propensity to trust is not driven by levels of national income, but by high national levels of income disparity.

The Data on Income Disparity

The US has become an economically stratified society. The US Census Bureau this month released data that startled even the Bureau itself: fully one-third of the US population is either in poverty or within 50% of the poverty line.

At the same time, income disparity has grown, especially at the top end; this is the result not just of recent events, but of longer-term policies.

Income disparity is not just a trust issue, but an economic issue as well. AsJames Chanos says:

Income inequality in this country is just getting worse and worse and worse. And that is not a recipe for stable growth.

But stratification is not the only problem. Some find it acceptable as long as one can aspire to a higher stratum. But what if mobility between strata has become ossified?

Unfortunately, income mobility in the United States is now well below that in Canada, Denmark, Australia, Spain, Germany, France, and several other OECD countries. (Great Britain and Italy still have sharper class divisions).

If you’re poor, and have little prospect of improving your lot in life, you are not likely to be a trusting person. Instead, you are likely to be resentful, hostile, suspicious, skeptical, and not necessarily inclined to be law-abiding.

The combined stratification and ossification of our society doesn’t add up to an economically healthy country.

The Problem

The economic value of high trust, at both an individual and a social level, is undeniably enormous.  Yet, our inability to analyze the problem is exceeded only by our political inability to do something about it.

Most “data” about trust consists of little more than popularity or opinion surveys. When we see headlines like “trust in banking declined,” it is impossible to determine whether banks became less trustworthy, or people became less inclined to trust in general. This sort of data is useful mainly just as an indicator of PR effectiveness.

Trust Across America is one group striving to define trustworthiness at a corporate level; on the trusting data side, we have the GSS, but little else. But even as the data come slowly into focus, nowhere do we see a willingness to face the implied political dilemma.

Can business continue to afford the ideology that got us here? A major shiftfrom shareholder value to shared value is underway; various CSR initiativesare gaining strength. But these initiatives are aimed largely at making companies more trustworthy. They are laudable, but it’s far from clear that such changes would have any effect on stratification or mobility.

In retrospect, a variety of social and political policy choices over time got us to the current state of low trust. Yet talk of reducing income inequality or increasing social mobility is the third rail in both politics and business in the US today.

It is probably still true that America is the land of opportunity for those with the right skills and attitudes. Unfortunately, Americans themselves increasingly don’t match that description. And so the prospect of further declines in trust, and consequently in economic health, seems likely.

How Can You Know Whom To Trust

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THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN Forbes.com

The news is drenched in stories of declining trust. Trust in our institutions, trust in companies, trust in our leaders – all are down. We need not surrender to mass cynicism, but it’s worth exploring: just how do you know whom to trust?

A Trick Question?

“Whom can you trust?” sounds simple and straightforward enough – but it’s a trick question, for two reasons. First of all, you can’t know the answer with certainty. Secondly, the question is as much about the trustor as it is about the trustee.

No Guarantees. Ronald Reagan’s famous dictum “trust but verify,” was misleading; if you have to verify, you’re not trusting. There simply is no trust without risk. To trust, by definition, is to put oneself in harms way of the actions of another in the belief that the other will not choose harm.

Hockey great Wayne Gretzky put it well: the only way to never miss a shot is to never take one. The only way to never trust the wrong person is to never trust anyone.

It Takes Two to Trust. Asking “whom can I trust,” makes it sound like trust is all about the other person. But it also has to do with us. For one thing, it depends on what’s at stake. I might trust Amazon to guess my preferences in books ­– but not to line me up with a potential date. You might trust someone to recommend a stock but not share with them family health and insurance information. You can’t answer “whom can I trust,” without answering, “to do what?”

Finally there’s your own risk profile. You probably have a friend who takes more social risks than you do and another friend who’s less risky than you are when it comes to investments. Whom can you trust? Whomever you’re talking about, your friends may answer differently. The only answer that counts is your own.

Trustworthiness: The Four Virtues

Of course, there is such a thing as trustworthiness of the other party and it has a lot to do with whether you can trust them. Trustworthiness of organizations is one thing; trustworthiness in people is another. In people, we might thing of trustworthiness as a collection of four virtues.

Credibility. Do you think the person speaks truthfully? More importantly than not lying, do they speak the whole truth – are they transparent? Are their credentials readily present and do you understand them? Can they answer your questions in ways you can understand? While all this may sound objective, there’s an important subject component of credibility as well: do you believe the person?  If your gut instinct is to doubt, and you are not a completely risk-averse person, then listen to your gut.

Reliability. Can you depend on this person to do what they say they’ll do? Do they have a track record with you? If not with you, can they demonstrate a track record with others, as in references?

Intimacy. Does the person listen to you in a way that makes you feel heard? Do you feel they’re being open with you? Do you feel the interaction is two-way? It’s OK to answer this one with emotional responses – part of trust is emotional and this is that part.

Other-Orientation. Is the person focused on themself or on you? Whose interests do they seem to have at heart? Is the conversation largely one-sided? Do you feel your questions are being heard and answered, or being deftly handled and disposed of? This question is partly about process, e.g. sales methods, but also partly emotional; again, that’s a valid part of deciding whom to trust.

You may object that a talented con-artist could fake each one of these traits and you’d be right. There are cases of fake credentials (credibility), faux friendliness (intimacy), and false references (reliability). This shouldn’t be surprising – it just proves these are the right elements of trust to be focusing on.

Reciprocity: The Magic Ingredient of Trust

Despite all the preceding comments, there is one unique factor affecting trustworthiness: paradoxically, it’s your own willingness to trust. It may seem odd, but another person’s trustworthiness can be affected by your own propensity to trust.

It’s been said, “The fastest way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.” Conversely, if you approach someone with great suspicion, micro-manage them and expect the worst of them – your expectations will probably be met. As another saying puts it, “Whether you expect good or ill of someone – you won’t be disappointed.”

Despite what you read in the headlines, most human beings in most situations are wired to respond positively to people who place trust in them. You may not be able to change physical reality through your thoughts: but you can have an impact on others’ behavior by the way you choose to approach them.

Whom can you trust? In several ways, the answer involves you as well as the other person.

Disclosure Is Not Transparency

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Most people see transparency as a good thing, and disclosure an obvious way to get there.  Often, we don’t distinguish between them.

But they’re not the same thing. And confusing them just lets bad behavior sneak back in through the back door.

What’s the difference between disclosure and transparency?

Transparency and Trust

Besides “able to transmit light,” the dictionary defines transparent as:

  • easily seen through, recognized, or detected: transparent excuses.
  • manifest; obvious: a story with a transparent plot.

In the simplest business terms, “transparent” means you can tell what’s going on.

If the link between transparency and trust isn’t self-evident, here are a few citations to help clarify it:

If I can see what’s going on, I know that I am not being misled. Motives become clear. Credibility is affirmed. Transparency is indeed a trust virtue.

Disclosure

Disclosure is a time-honored tool of regulators to achieve transparency. Food and pharmaceutical manufacturers are required to disclose ingredients, medical authors are required to reveal payment sources, the SEC frequently proposes disclosure as a tool, and so on.

Certainly you can’t find out what’s going on if information is actually hidden.  So disclosure is a necessary condition for transparency. But it’s hardly a sufficient one.

I don’t have much to say about the cost/benefit trade-off of greater disclosure in pursuit of transparency. Sometimes the benefit is obvious, other times not so much, sometimes not at all.

What’s more interesting to me is how the blind pursuit of disclosure can actually reduce transparency – even reduce people’s awareness of the distinction.

Over-Disclosure

Is it possible to have too much disclosure? So much disclosure that information gets lost in the blizzard of data?

On the face of it, disclosure is the handmaiden of transparency. But if disclosure becomes the end rather than the means, if regulators and consumer advocates become fixated on indicators rather than on what they indicate, then disclosure can actually become self-defeating.

Lawyers know that massive responses to discovery requests can overwhelm opposing counsel. Cheating spouses know that the best lies are those that disclose the most truth. Consumer lenders know to fast-talk the disclaimers at the end of radio ads, much like the small print on the ads and loan statements.

If disclosure isn’t accompanied by an ethos of transparency, it can be positively harmful. It is like crossing your fingers behind your back, taking movie reviews out of context, or word parsing a la “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

A trustworthy person, team or company will not settle for disclosure, but seek to offer transparency. A competent regulator will always remember that disclosure is just evidence. And a wise buyer will always look for the transparency that may, or may not, underlie the disclosure.

Trust relies on both data and intent.

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Many Trusted Advisor programs now offer CPE credits.  Please call Tracey DelCamp for more information at 856-981-5268–or drop us a note @ [email protected].

Killer Apps 2.0: Siri is Just the Teaser

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Last summer I wrote about how speech-to-text software may be a killer app. At the time, I mentioned the rumor about what was to become Siri, the “talk to me” assistant in Apple’s then-upcoming iOS5. I also talked about Dragon Naturally Speaking, a PC-based system.

That was then: this is now. Apple itself is actually understating Siri’s capabilities – and Nuance, maker of Dragon Dictation, has made another huge advance for the you-and-me users out there. In this post, I’ll just deal with Siri: look for the Dragon post shortly.

[Note: I could spin this as being about trust, but that’d be a stretch. Sometimes I just get excited about other stuff – like cool work tools. Hope you like it too.]

Siri: Much More than Meets the Ear

You’ve seen the ads for Siri, seen friends demo it, maybe tried it yourself. And it’s impressive. You can tell Siri “Google the planet Pluto,” or “Remind me to pick up toothpaste next time I’m at the drugstore.” (I use this feature quite a bit).

But the truth is much more powerful. Those are parlor tricks, anthropomorphic gimmicks to introduce a new technology to the masses. You, Trust Matters readers, can handle The Truth. So let me tell it to you.

Forget the virtual assistant. Note instead that speech-recognition capability is now built in to the operating system. That means it’s available to you in almost every window, in almost every app on the iPhone.

What Siri Really Means ­– Now

Let me be clear about what that means. Once inside the data-entry part of an app, you can now speak, and your voice will be converted to text.

For example:

Email: speak your emails – they will convert to text

Messaging: speak your text messages – they will convert to text

Evernote: hit your Evernote app button and just start talking

Twitter: speak your tweets, stop finger-pecking them

Facebook: don’t tap your message, just say it

Google+: don’t type it, just speak it

Search: speak your Google or Bing searches – they will convert to text

Maps: speak your destinations – you get the idea.

You can now speak, instead of type, into almost any text-enterable field in any app. That means Notes, Salesforce, Quora, YouTube, NYTimes, Amazon – you name it.

  • Hate having to type on that little screen? That excuse is no longer valid.
  • Wish you had a dictation service? You do now.
  • Still taking notes by hand until you get home to enter them? Puh-leeze.

The 30,000 Foot View

This technology is not perfect; but it’s even better than the old Dragon app for the iPhone that I wrote about just six months ago, and it’s bound to get better.

As with all technologies, it will be more useful for some things than for others. I find it especially useful in dictating text messages, taking long notes of phone calls or meetings, and dictating thoughts about future articles or blog-posts.

Remember the core value proposition of voice-to-text: We can talk 5x as fast as we can write; and we can read 3x faster than we can listen. That’s a 15x systemic advantage for communications efficiency. When was the last time we saw a technology that improved communications efficiency by 1500%?

Siri is to voice-to-text as a camel’s nose in the tent is to the camel. This will be one very, very big ride.

Next post: voice to text on your Mac or PC desktop as a one-stroke utility – it’s here now.

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Many Trusted Advisor programs now offer CPE credits.  Please call Tracey DelCamp for more information at 856-981-5268–or drop us a note @ [email protected].

There Are Two Kinds of People In This World…

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In a piece called Late Bloomers, Malcolm Gladwell describes writer Ben Fountain, who wandered for decades doing research before he became an overnight sensation.

By contrast, some writers (Melville, T. S. Eliot) instinctively knew their minds and needed no research beyond inspiration. The same is true of painters: think of Cezanne (the wanderer) vs. Picasso (the intuitive).

Reading Gladwell, I suddenly recalled Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western Clint Eastwood vehicle, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. In the film, Tuco (the Ugly –  Eli Wallach) and the the Man with No Name (the Good – Eastwood) exchange a meme – “There are two kinds of people in this world, my friend –” followed by parings like, “Those who have guns and those who do not.”

When Sergio Leone and Malcolm Gladwell agree, I submit, you can be confident you’re on to something. Which is, itself, an example of the thing – we humans have a passion for dichotomies.

Whether or not there really are two kinds of anything in this world – we insist on dividing them up that way. It’s a primary sense-making rule for us.

Famous Pairs

  • Men and women, black and white; up and down, day and night.
  • Debits and credits; assets and debts; good and evil; owns and lets.
  • Angels and devils; sound and sight; pens and swords; heavy and light.
  • Classic and modern, north and south, east and west, your ears not your mouth.
  • Innies and outies, type one and type two; comedy and tragedy, feeling up and feeling blue.
  • Eastern and Western, right handed and left, smooth and anarchic, clumsy and deft.
  • Cloudy and sunny, shiny and rusted, aggressive and passive, trusted and  distrusted.

And on it goes.

Reality isn’t binary; our view of it is.

The Primacy of Two

It’s not that we don’t love threes: witness 3-legged stools, the three musketeers, three strikes you’re out, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, the Holy Trinity, and the Three Stooges.

But after that things fall down. Consultants are in love with 2×2 matrices (see my “Rule of the Axes” in – wait for it – You Too Can Be a Strategy Consultant – Three Secret Tools).  But notice, the power of matrices rests in the combination of two binary lists.

When you get to five, forget it; that’s when you start needing mnemonic devices to remember (the SMART model, Every Good Boy Deserves Fun, SNAFU). Heck you might as well be doing Top Ten lists.

No, the upper limit of natural human organizational ability is three; and if we had our druthers, we’d really prefer to be dealing with twos.

The Good and the Bad

It helps greatly to dichotomize the world so efficiently. Think how easy our lives are made when we can label things hot or cold, stop or go, left or right.

Of course, some things in life don’t benefit from such a lack of nuance. Interpersonal relations, politics and trust come to mind. The trick is remembering when to dichotomize and when not to.

But wait – that’s another dichotomy, please forgive me. After all, to err is human; to forgive, divine.  (Damn, did it again).

Roses are red, violets are blue;

Some jokes rhyme–some don’t.

But at least that’s another two!

A Better New Year’s Resolution

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I wrote a good blog post at this time five years ago, and haven’t improved on it yet. Here it is again.

Happy New Year.

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My unscientific sampling says many people make New Years resolutions, but few follow through. Net result—unhappiness.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

You could, of course, just try harder, stiffen your resolve, etc. But you’ve been there, tried that.

You could also ditch the whole idea and just stop making resolutions. Avoid goal-failure by eliminating goal-setting. Effective, but at the cost of giving up on aspirations.

I heard another idea: replace the New Year’s Resolution List with a New Year’s Gratitude List. Here’s why it makes sense.

First, most resolutions are about self-improvement—this year I resolve to: quit smoking, lose weight, cut the gossip, drink less, exercise more, and so on.

All those resolutions are rooted in a dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs—or with oneself.

In other words: resolutions often have a component of dissatisfaction with self. For many, it isn’t just dissatisfaction—it’s self-hatred. And the stronger the loathing of self, the stronger the resolutions—and the more they hurt when they go unfulfilled. It can be a very vicious circle.

Second, happy people do better. This has some verification in science, and it’s a common point of view in religion and psychology—and in common sense.

People who are slightly optimistic do better in life. People who are happy are more attractive to other people. In a very real sense, you empower what you fear—and attract what you put out.

Ergo, replace resolutions with gratitude. The best way to improve oneself is paradoxical—start by being grateful for what you already have. That turns your aspirations from negative (fixing a bad situation) to positive (making a fine situation even better).

Gratitude forces our attention outwards, to others—a common recommendation of almost all spiritual programs.

Finally, gratitude calms us. We worry less. We don’t obsess. We attract others by our calm, which makes our lives connected and meaningful. And before long, we tend to smoke less, drink less, exercise more, gossip less, and so on. Which of course is what we thought we wanted in the first place.

But the real truth is—it wasn’t the resolutions we wanted in the first place. It was the peace that comes with gratitude. We mistook cause for effect.

Go for an attitude of gratitude. The rest are positive side-effects.

Why We Don’t Trust Politicians (Part II)

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In Part I, we said health care is a major cause of our declining trust in politicians. Our political inability to find a solution has led to massive economic costs, a subsidy-driven public sense of entitlement, and high-profit segments of industry hooked on maintaining the status quo. The situation is truly a mess.

We also promised a solution that might work – but with a challenge to politicians.

Context

America was built on free enterprise and an emphasis on individual achievement. We also have a long history of compassion for the least fortunate (based more on private charity than in some other countries). Both of those laudable goals have been elevated to near-constitutional status: the pursuit of liberty and the pursuit of life, if not of happiness.

The problem comes when the two collide: when some individuals can afford massively expensive healthcare but the collective society cannot.

If we focused solely on the ‘life’ side, we’d get a national health system that would limit choice and proscribe options for all.  That is anathema to the ‘give me liberty’ ethos.

But focusing on ‘liberty’ alone would create discrepancies in health care (imagine ambulances carting one victim of a car crash to hospital while leaving another on the pavement) widely perceived as unjust.

Most other countries have faced this problem.

The most obvious solution is a two-tier system: a public system providing basic and preventive care for all, and a private system paid for with after-tax dollars for those who can afford more. Similar systems exist in Canada and the UK, for example.

While most other countries accept this basic design – which treats healthcare as a universal right – in the gridlocked state of affairs in the present-day US, that solution feels like offending every special interest group in the country.

And so we watch, collectively, as our inability to act slowly freezes our remaining degrees of freedom. And still we don’t act.

The Solution

Any solution must face one certain fact: we cannot afford to give the best possible care to everyone at all times. Canada and Britain have found their version of addressing this simple fact. We need to find an American twist to gain acceptance from our peculiarly American sensibilities.

Let’s be clear: this means, of necessity, a means-tested public system that won’t buy you knee replacements to improve your tennis game, acne treatments to fix your complexion or motorized wheel chairs to get you around your home.  It won’t allow doctor choice or the right to sue.

Instead, it would be take a number and take your seat to see the doctor who, by the way, wants to work an eight-hour day for a modest salary and a regular schedule. It would be a system in which people of means could get more and better care – because they can afford it – and it would require a public ethos that accepts this disparity the same way it accepts Mercedes on public highways.

The private system could be employer-provided (taxable to the employee as compensation), or paid for personally with after-tax dollars. Those who choose not to insure and who don’t meet means-test requirements would be cared for by the public system but billed for services at full retail rates.

Care in the private system would be better in some ways (more time with patients), but worse in others (MRI machines and drugs would lack the cost-reducing scale they enjoy today).

Because people in the private system would pay for their healthcare and people in the public system will face waits and limited services, both will choose to use less of it – and devote more of their income to other goods. Lower utilization will drive down costs. Those in the private system will be more aware of costs. Those in the public system will get necessary care, but not everything they might want. There will be fewer hospitals with sophisticated equipment; fewer stand-alone surgery centers owned by doctors; less research to improve care and treatment; and less profit for the health care industry.

Getting to the Solution

Just as not everyone can be a millionaire, not everyone can have the very best healthcare. Just as some of us have better housing and more discretionary income – so some of us will have better health care.

What is ironic about this approach is that it ought to be easy for Americans. Given the twin ideological goals of equality and liberty, the US has always put more emphasis on liberty, compared to Europe and much of the world. The American answer to disparity has always been the ability to say, “That is today – but I can change this world for the better, for myself and my children.”

Where our politicians have truly let us down, and earned our distrust, is by betraying this American sense of the future. They have been peddling short-term solutions, promising everyone everything, here, now, today.

They are not alone in spreading this bad thinking – just look at banking and housing. But we’re talking about health-care here, and it’s politicians who must let go of promising the greatest possible healthcare to everyone all the time.

Americans know well how to offset inequality with hope. Maybe the ultimate reason we don’t trust our politicians is that they are being un-American, promising us the moon when we know all too well which planet we really live on.

The road to trust, for politicians, has got to go through Truth.

The 4-Minute Mile of Personal Change

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Most of us know that a life of resentment is a life wasted. But how fast can a human being recover from grief, betrayal, anger? Is there a four-minute mile barrier of recovery? What are the natural limits to human change?

Julie’s Story

I know Julie. She was estranged from her alcoholic father, reconciling only on his deathbed. A few years later, her mother, with whom she was very close, died as well. Julie was griefstricken, worn down with sadness at work and with her children; she was barely functioning on autopilot.

After a year, she visited a psychologist. “I spent the entire first meeting crying,” she told me. At the second meeting, the counsellor asked her, “What do you admire in both your parents that you’d wish to perpetuate?”

“I was dumbstruck,” she said. “I sat there for 3 full minutes, thinking about the implications for my life. Everything fell into place. I thanked the shrink profusely, left before my time was up, and never went back.”

That was five years ago. Julie is upbeat, strong, productive and a huge positive force for good in all those she meets.

Rachel’s Story

I know Rachel, an extremely successful woman. She told me her husband had cheated on her some years ago, but that they had reconciled and were now very happy.

“You look fine now,” I said, “but that must have been hard. How long did it take you to get over it?”

“It was awful,” she said. “It must have taken me a week.”

“A week?” I asked incredulously.

She explained that she had let work get in the way of their sex life, but that she enjoyed sex too and why let the past get in the way of a great and full life going forward?

“And if he cheated again?” I asked.

“Oh, it’d be all over,” she laughed. “You only get one second chance with me.”

Jill’s Story

I don’t know Jill Bolte Taylor, but she has given one of the more powerful TED talks of all time, as well as having written a powerful book. A brain scientist who had a stroke, she was uniquely qualified to observe what was happening to her – and, it turns out, to learn from the experience.

To over-simplify, she already knew the profoundly different perspectives of the right and left hemispheres of our brains. One is logical, cognitive, ego-protecting and fearful. The other is universal, joyful, connected and without fear.

But through her stroke, Jill discovered we have enormous control over which part of our brain we choose to live through. In her words:

“Before my stroke, I thought I was a product of my brain and had no idea that I had some say about how I responded to the emotions surging through me. On an intellectual level, I realized that I could monitor and shift my cognitive thoughts, but it never dawned on me that I had some say in how I perceived my emotions.

“No one told me that it only took 90 seconds for my biochemistry to capture, and then release me.”

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey

How long does it take to achieve escape velocity from our responses? How long is the emotional 4-minute mile?

A brain scientist tells us: 90 seconds. We are slaves to our neuro-chemistry for 90 seconds.

After that – it’s all on you. If you stay there, it’s your own damn fault.

Making It Work

Jill Bolte’s recommendations are along the lines of meditation.

For others, the serenity prayer works powerfully.

And if sweetness and light is not your cup of tea, there’s the in-your-face-cold-shower-with-obscenities approach embodied in Julien Smith’s excellent new (free) eBook The Flinch.

I can’t tell you how – you must work with what you’ve got. But I can tell you – or rather, Julie, Rachel and Jill can tell you – that what you’re shooting for is 90 seconds.