This week I had an experience that restored my faith in humanity and the basic goodness of people. Two specific events led to me to feeling this way.
San Francisco undertook a massive community H1N1 vaccination effort for thousands of city residents. All vaccinations were free and they did thousands of the vaccinations over the course of just a few hours. 400+ volunteers (non-paid) gave up their entire day to help with this effort. Both non-medical and medical volunteers wrangled thousands of people through a brilliantly organized public health effort. Everyone was astoundingly helpful and caring. The thousands of people lined up for their vaccinations were orderly, friendly and the community feel was evident. The volunteer doctor who gave me my shot chatted with me briefly. He had just come back from volunteering his medical services in Haiti. I could sense he was a truly generous, good man.
I then left the auditorium where the vaccinations were being given and read a book on my Kindle (blatant product plug – I love my Kindle) in the park across the way as I waited for my partner to finish getting his shot. As I sat there and read, I watched a young family of husband, wife and two small children walk through the park. They walked around with big smiles on their faces and when they encountered someone who looked homeless, or otherwise looked like they needed some cheering up, the father and mother handed the children sandwiches and told them to go ask the person if they wanted a sandwich. Some of the faces on the people getting the sandwiches lit up. They were touched by the generosity. The children giving the sandwiches smiled back. The parents beamed as they watched their children carry out the social giving they were trying to engender in their children. It was a lovely thing to watch.
So, anytime I feel we’re doomed as a culture, or I feel otherwise negative about the future of humanity, I’m going to remember these moments. I get all warm and fuzzy when I do, and that’s a good thing.
I hope you have moments like this in your life. It’s my holiday and New Year’s wish for you that you do.
We are all creative people. How we create and what form that creation takes varies dramatically, but we are all creative. However, creative people often struggle with the process. Anguish and self-doubt often pervade the creative process for many. For anyone who has ever felt this way, please watch this video. It helped me and I hope it helps you.
Here’s a poem I wrote in May of 1980. At the time I was working as an Administrative Assistant and bemoaning the drudgery of corporate life I was dealing with at the time, which is quite clear from the poem that came out of me that day. Maybe you’ve had these same feelings at your job.
Often I sit and contemplate my inevitable demise
And wonder if my stable life is truly smart and wise
Sitting at a desk from early, till often very late
Undoubtedly a common, but nonetheless ill fate.
The papers arrive upon my desk as the day begins
Secretaries gossip of the previous weekend’s sins
I shuffle and I shuffle, but the paperwork seems to grow
Then the clock shows noon, and I decide to go.
I push into the elevator, packed like canned sardines
And eavesdrop on a couple discussing what EST really means
Arriving at the restaurant, I find that there’s a wait
Once again I question my nine to five work fate.
After gobbling down my lunch, I hurry back to my job
Once again pushing through the now fed office mob
The papers are still there, in even greater number
I sit down and resume my nine to five work slumber.
Cranking out all the work one man can possibly do
I finally look up from my desk and notice it’s only two
Only three more hours of this with which I must contend
Eventually the clock shows five, another day’s work end.
An hour later I arrive at home, and start to watch TV
Wishing that the character there would switch his place with me
I begin to fall asleep, but awake suddenly startled when
I realize that tomorrow, I’ve got to do it all again.
This is a post that appears on my The Art of Self Education blog dedicated to providing information, inspiration and resources for adult self learners.
One of the skills that benefits everyone in terms of networking and productivity is learning people’s names. Once you are introduced to someone, it’s amazing how impressive it is to others when you remember their name the next time you see them. Of course, this is not new information.
Many years ago my father gave me a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and I still consider it a classic. One of the guiding bits of advice Carnegie offers is to “remember that a man’s name is the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” That’s wise advice.
By nature, I’m not inclined to remember people’s names. I have to work at it. But I consider it something for which exerting the effort is worthwhile. So many times I’ve remembered someone’s name upon meeting them again and seen the clear sign of pleasure the other person experienced when they realized I’d remembered their name. It’s validating. We all like it.
Enter Facebook. While I use Facebook for my closer circle of friends (I use LinkedIn professionally), I also have an extended range of casual friends I’m connected to on Facebook that I meet only rarely and often don’t remember their names. Now on Facebook I regularly see their picture alongside their full name. This reinforces their name in my mind, and this includes their last name too which most don’t remember nearly as often as a first name. All of sudden I’m remembering people’s names better. Yay!
Human interaction skills like remembering names is something we should all learn. It will serve us well in both our personal and professional lives. Not all learning has to be comprised of absorbing facts or complex technical skills. Much of the learning we should all pursue centers around how we can best interact and communicate with others. I’m glad Facebook has helped me with one human interaction skill in which I was truly lacking any expertise. Maybe it can help you too.
This is a post that appears on my The Art of Self Education blog dedicated to providing information, inspiration and resources for adult self learners.
One of the important components of good self education habits is the ability to focus. I don’t buy in too much to innate intelligence as the determining factor in whether someone can learn well. I’ve just seen too many instances of someone with what appeared to be average intelligence and skills excel far beyond others who supposedly had much more of both. I believe focus makes the difference. Someone who can truly focus on a learning project is going to learn better than someone who is constantly distracted or multitasking.
Alan H. Cohen’s advice in his book Why Your Life Sucks and What You Can Do About It is one of the smartest bits of advice I’ve ever read in a self-improvement book. (It’s a great book by the way and I recommend it.) Here’s what he wrote.
The secret of genius is focus. If you can laser your attention on any subject or project, it will reveal its blueprint to you. George Washington Carver discovered 325 uses for the peanut and 100 for the sweet potato! Great geniuses are powerful focusers. Many have been called eccentric or insane because they put aside worldly concerns for the sake of their music, art, architecture, drama, inventing, or writing. But they are the individuals who change the world, while those with scattered attention wade through mediocre lives. Geniuses don’t fritter their precious minds on mass trends. They create the trends that alter the masses.
Cohen’s insight is so true and the focus he mentions, combined with tenacity and conviction, is an astoundingly powerful combination.
Recent research on the effects of multitasking back up the claim that focus is important and gives pause to those of us who are constantly emailing, tweeting, surfing, texting, watching television, playing video games and otherwise flitting constantly from thing to thing while we attempt to learn something.
According to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, heavy multitaskers are easily distracted by irrelevant information. A potential reason for this may be that people who multitask tend to retain all of that distracting, and often mundane, information in short-term memory. If your short-term memory is full of a lot of stuff that’s not relevant to the real tasks at hand (such as learning something), it affects your ability to focus.
So what can we learn from all this. When you want to learn something, focus o it. Set aside time to focus solely on your learning. If your environment is distracting, change it. Go to a library or anywhere you can best focus. Or find yourself some good noise-canceling headphones to create some privacy if you’re in a loud environment. No two of us are alike and what might be distracting surroundings to one person might be an atmosphere of solitude to another.
In addition to controlling the distractions within our environment, we need to minimize the distractions within ourselves. Whatever it takes to bring your focus to the objective of the moment, make that a part of your self education practice. Meditation might help. Taking care of those lagging chores or tasks on your to do list might free up your mind to focus on more important matters. Perhaps you can “trick” yourself into focusing by thinking of your learning projects in 15-minute chunks of time. Whatever works for you, do it. The ability to focus is imperative if you’re going to maintain a life of effective self education.
Remember what Peter McWilliams said, “Our thoughts create our reality – where we put our focus is the direction we tend to go.” So put your focus on your learning and you’ll learn.
I’m an extremely happy corporate employee these days. I have one of the best jobs around with interesting work, a great boss, a great team I manage, and a great environment filled with people who respect what I do. It’s fulfilling in so many ways. I’m lucky and I know it.
However, there’s still a part of me that needs some other avenues of expression. So I’m undertaking a new venture. Over the next few months I plan to launch a number of blogs, each pertaining to a specific area of personal interest.
Since I’m content with my current employment, I don’t intend to push too hard to monetize the blogs. If I do make some extra money from them, that would be great. But it’s my need to both help people and to feel fully creative that’s driving this new venture that I’m naming Race Bannon Media.
For now, this site will become the online home for Race Bannon Media. Stay tuned to this site for more information.
To visit my first foray into the blogosphere go to my The Art of Self Education blog and let me know what you think.
The Four Agreements
By Don Miguel Ruiz
Published by Amber-Allen Publishing
This book was recommended to me by some good friends (thank you David, Shawn and Gene). I’m glad they did. It’s a quick read I completed in an afternoon and its brevity and conciseness is part of its charm.
In essence, Ruiz’ message, based on ancient Toltec wisdom, is that we’ve all made agreements to believe certain things, most of those beliefs based on falsehoods. The process of indoctrination into these belief systems Ruiz refers to as our domestication, and that terminology is apt. Through our domestication, foisted upon us by society, family, friends, religion and other sources, we end up living lives contrary to who we really are. Ruiz emphasizes the need for every human being to live their lives in congruence to who they truly are, not who they pretend to be in order to please internal and external judgments.
The four agreements Ruiz offers, if adhered to and assimilated into our daily lives, allow us to push past unhealthy and dysfunctional agreements we’ve made and form new agreements that foster us living lives as we truly are. Only by being who we really are, living the lives we want to live, can we do honor to ourselves, God, or whatever energies in this life we personally feel deserve honor.
The four agreement are:
Be impeccable with your word.
Don’t take anything personally.
Don’t make assumptions.
Always do your best.
I won’t go into deep explanations of what each of these agreements means. Rather, I strongly advise you to pick up this delightful volume and read Ruiz’ explanations for yourself. You won’t be sorry.
What Are You Optimistic About?: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Why Things Are Good and Getting Better
Edited by John Brockman
Anyone who reads, listens to, or watches mainstream news and media undoubtedly gets the impression that the state of mankind is in rapid decline and we’re all heading towards utter destruction and misery. Maybe some of this is true, but it’s nice to hear some good news for a change. And this book gives us good news put forth by some of the world’s leading thinkers and visionaries.
John Brockman, Publisher and Editor of Edge, has organized a collection of wise and informed answers to the question he posed to various notable contributors. That question was:
As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks for ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever better put.
What are you optimistic about? Why? Surprise us!
Read this book and prepare to feel a bit better about mankind’s fate and the future of life on this planet. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism
By James Geary
Quotes and aphorisms have always fascinated me. There’s something compelling about short, concise wisdom that packs a punch that longer prose might not. For those people like me who worship these forms of writing, I urge you to read this book.
James Geary’s book is a masterpiece. It chronicles and expounds upon notable aphorisms from the ancient wisdom of Lao-Tzu and Buddha to the more contemporary Barbara Kruger. Along the way you learn a bit of history, biographical backgrounds and chunks of hearty information that satisfies in a way few books do.
This book has become a member of my own personal top 10 list. I highly recommend it.
Don’t try and figure out a primary theme or focus of this site (at least not yet). It doesn’t have one. If there’s something I find interesting, it might be talked about here. Over time I plan to continually build this site into a destination for anyone looking for information about me, my personal interests, my professional life and more. I hope you’ll come back regularly to visit me here online.
I’d love hearing from you. If you’d like to communicate with me, click Contact.
Thanks for visiting my new blog site. I just launched this site. So there’s not much content here yet. But stay tuned. There will be soon. And if you have any suggestions for what you'd like to see on this site, please let me know. ~ Race Bannon