Give Your Best. Consistently.

I'm editing a book manuscript on what a successful life is, in our time. In the book I'm interacting extensively with six great thinkers throughout the centuries, including Lao Tsu, Confucius, Cicero, and Emerson. In a passage on Confucius, while explicating some of ideas, I made a point that I'd like to pass along today.  We enter amid the passage. So here goes.

<<When there’s action to be taken, give your best. This is great, basic advice for any endeavor. Early in my career as a public speaker, someone occasionally would tell me in advance of a talk, “This is a really important group”—as if I should take care to be on my game for this one. My response was always, “Every group is a really important group.”  And I meant it. Whether I’m earning the equivalent of a year’s academic salary from speaking to an international group of powerful leaders for an hour, or I’m giving a free talk to a local school or charity, I can’t even conceive of not doing my very best.  

Each group I speak to is, in my estimation and for the duration of that presentation, the single most important gathering of people on earth—regardless of their worldly status as measured by any other standards. I have my own standards. That group is of unrivalled importance to me. The same goes for sitting at home alone with a book, or typing away at the computer. My level of commitment is always the same. Why? First, it’s a matter of personal identity and professional honor. I am who I am. And my work is what it is. No external circumstance can change that. I bring to any situation the utmost of respect for all the people involved, or even potentially involved.

But there’s a second reason as well. A consistent effort in all things on a daily basis can make a huge difference to the ultimate outcomes we experience. Consistency is akin to what military thinkers call “a force multiplier.” It’s a source of leverageand power. And yet, it’s oddly and surprisingly rare to come across this quality in people’s lives – which truly astonishes me. Whether we think of consistency as harmony, fidelity, or constancy, this characteristic is as vital as it is widely ignored in our day.>>

Focus and Flow

One of the most endangered skills in our time, and one of the most important, is the art of focus. The New York Times just ran an op ed about the importance of great lecture classes in our schools, and especially college, where students learn to listen and focus on complex ideas and sequences of ideas.

Call to mind a totally unfocused photograph, blurry and indistinct. Now contrast that with a picture that's crisp, clear and well focused. Our minds can range through a similar spectrum. Successful people in every domain of human activity tend to be those who can attain and keep a clear focus on what they want and what it takes to get there. 

At its peak, focus becomes flow, a transcendent mindset of absolute absorbedness in an activity or enterprise. And flow seems to be the key to both creativity and masterful levels of excellence.

The world around us conspires to distract us from ever experiencing focus or flow. But the only way we can contribute our best to the world is to resist its siren songs enough that we master focus and grow more adept at flow.

With focus and flow - Oh, the places you can go!

The Night I Flew the Plane

Have I ever told you about the time that, as the sole passenger on a fairly large twin engine corporate airplane flying through a blizzard at night somewhere over the midwest, I was called up into the cockpit by the pilot, and asked to fly the plane? 

Yeah. In case I’ve never mentioned it before, I’m not making this up. I was staring out my window from my plush leather seat on the right side of the plane, looking at the torrent of huge snowflakes swirling all around us in the darkness, when the co-pilot suddenly came back to my seat and told me the captain wanted me up front.

What? Was it a logic emergency? Or an unexpected metaphysical conundrum? In the circumstances, I was hoping he didn't want to chat quickly about arguments in favor of life after death.

When I got over my surprise and made it into the cockpit, the somewhat elderly looking captain said, “So, I’ve been told you’re a little worried about flying.” I was, at that time in my life many years ago, actually worried more about crashing, but I agreed to his milder characterization, not even wanting, in the situation, to bring up that other topic, or even the word.

“Have a seat,” he said. “I want you to fly the plane for a while.”

“Wait. What?”

“I’m going to show you how to fly the plane.”

"Right now? In all this snow?”

“Yep.”

“Are you sure?”

He said, “I don’t think you’ll ever be worried any more.”

Or anything else any more, I thought. “You’re really absolutely sure?”

“Yes, indeed. Take the open seat here.”

So, to make a long story short, but not as short as it could have been, with the plane under my command, I learned how to fly that night.

And I learned how far we are, in normal circumstances, from really paying attention to what we’re doing. There are times, like, for example, in flying a plane for the first time in your life, and at night, in a blizzard, where your senses are instantly so enhanced you almost feel like you have perceptual superpowers. Your mind is so clear that you can’t believe such a degree of clarity is possible. Your focused concentration is so complete - well, you get the idea. If we could tap into that in more normal situations, just imagine.

It helps the story for me to tell you that the airplane was a vintage Grumman Mallard, a sea plane that had been shot down and dredged up after the second world war from the bottom of Tokyo Bay and then completely rebuilt. And, no, I’m not making this up, either. That’s what they told me when I had said how remarkable it was. It was such a beautiful plane, full of gorgeous woods and supple leather, and all in a style not seen since 1945. When I first got on board, I felt like Humphrey Bogart. That was before I started feeling like Amelia Earhart.

That night I learned a lot about how airplanes fly, and how the controls work - enough to have great admiration for the people whose job is to get us in this mode to where we’re going. And for some reason, that surreal experience did give me more assurance about flying. I mean, if I can do it, even for just a few minutes, I guess I can trust the licensed professionals, two of whom are busily getting me somewhere as I type these words. I just hope they don’t need me up there again. It’s a 757, a little big for my current and rusty skills.

And, Oh, this blog post should probably have a philosophical point, or moral - so here goes: Philosophers are capable of more than mere flights of fancy.

Just kidding. If a philosopher can fly a plane at night in a blizzard, then I guess almost anyone can do almost anything - at least, with a trained professional hovering close by.

And if you ever see me walking down the street wearing surgical scrubs, or SWAT gear, don’t look so surprised. My toga might be at the cleaners.

Animals: Our Mystical Colleagues

In this week’s American Scholar, in a column on books that have influenced people's lives, a weekly piece called “Reading Lessons,” Sy Montgomery, the author of 20 books on animals and nature, discusses a book he once read that was formative for his career. And he quotes and comments:

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,” Henry Beston wrote in his 1928 classic, The Outermost House. “For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.”

This week’s writeup is on a book subtitled “A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod.” Montgomery goes on to say:

Beston brought to his observations of the natural world all of his talents—not just his intellect, but his emotion and intuition as well. His book is, to me, a blueprint for how to open your soul to creation, how to see animals in a new, humbling, and revelatory way. 

A lady has helped us manage our home for nearly twenty years. Our dogs know when she leaves her own house across town to come to ours. Our cat has trained us in various ways to do what he wants us to do, and when he wants us to do it. How much do animals understand? What’s their thought and feeling world like? When I ponder this intensely enough, it makes me want to be a vegetarian. We’ve even had a group of wild deer years ago show that they knew when the kids would come home from school each day, and gather behind our house to wait for their daily afternoon treat of dried corn. Who was their timekeeper? Who called the meeting? One day, when we were late, the boldest of the deer, a young one, came across to our back deck, and walked up the steps to peer into the door, presumably to find out what was delaying things.

I’m sure you have your own stories. What is our place in nature, really? How much could we benefit and learn by opening ourselves to new insights? What do we need to learn from our mystical colleagues, the animals?

Maybe you should ask your dog or cat.

Using the Power of the Mind

How do you use the power of your mind? In the weight room, my workout partner prepares himself for a really heavy bench press lift by vividly imagining a guy in college who tried to steal his girlfriend. And by visualizing this nemesis, he mentally takes himself back in time and gets really mad. He feels the anger. And he says it fuels his strength and his subsequent accomplishment with the lift.

It's amazing to me that he can still get so worked up about something that happened thirty years ago. But he can. And he uses it well. But I can't do that. I take a really different approach.

When I lie down on the bench with three hundred pounds or more looming over me, I go to a happy place. I imagine a beautiful day at the beach near my home. The sand is soft, and just the right hue of very light beige, the sky is an amazing blue, with a few little puffy white clouds floating by, over to the east and the water is a stunning aquamarine, with great waves tossing off sparkling whitecaps.

My workout partner likes to call this my "Puppies, Butterflies, and Rainbows Approach." But it works. It Zens me out and lifts me up. It's exactly what I need. I don't try to talk my friend out of his college rage re-creation, despite my worries about his blood pressure. And he doesn't try to get me away from those cute little puppies on the beach. We use different approaches, but to the same end - to get our minds into a place where we can draw more deeply on the resources we have, in order to face the challenge that confronts us.

What do you do? Should you do more? Those puppies could use some attention.

The Golden Triad for Intellectual Contribution

Three things are needed, if you want to make an intellectual contribution in any field. That may sound daunting, and like an aspiration for the few, but it's really not.

In anything we do, new ideas can be useful. In fact, the right new idea can create a breakthrough. If your job involves working with your mind as well as with your feet or hands, or any other body part, making a real intellectual contribution to the enterprise you're engaged in will help any others who work with you, and, as a side effect, will help you to shine. 

In my first life as a philosopher, in a university setting, my areas of expertise were the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. In all my work, three things mattered greatly to me. I like to think of them together as The Golden Triad for Intellectual Contribution in any field. They are:

Precision

Innovation

Simplicity

It's hard to make a real contribution in any domain of life or work unless you understand well what's already going on. You've got to know your stuff, and not just vaguely, or generally, but with precision. Sloppy thinking abounds, and it's up to you and me to do something about it. Precision is every bit as important as it is rare, and there's no better place to start in solving any problem, or assessing any opportunity, than grasping it precisely.

The Crowd tends to learn what's done, so they can go and do likewise. The Few master what's done so they can go and do better. But that means innovation.

I think that creativity is tied up at the core of the meaning of life. I have a whole chapter on that idea ("Business and the Meaning of Life") in my 1997 book, If Aristotle Ran General Motors: The New Soul of Business. We're not here to be just replicators and copyists in every way. We exist to be creators. When you understand your field, or a problem you face, with precision, that positions you to be innovative as well. And you should never settle for anything less. Innovation is what sets people and businesses apart.

But a lot of people who understand the need for precision and innovation go on to complicate things needlessly. That's a common problem for, especially, anyone who is new to a field. It's even found among old hands who have never risen to the level of top mastery in what they do. They think that to be precise, they have to be complicated. And when they're innovative, their creative solutions can sometimes be convoluted and complex beyond belief.

Simplicity is not only a sign of mastery, it's a powerful tool, and, as science has come to understand, a mark of deep truth.

Some people purchase simplicity at the sacrifice of precision, or innovation. That's extremely common in the area of practical philosophy I work in now, seeking for new insight on life and work, and on such issues as success. There are a lot of writers and speakers completely sacrificing any real precision of thought in order to be catchy, clever and memorable. Other people pursue innovation or precision at the cost of simplicity. Even in my most complex contributions to academic philosophy, I always sought for a beauty of simplicity in the ideas and their expression.

With these three qualities, or ideals, you can make an intellectual contribution to anything you're doing that will be helpful and memorable. Indeed, why settle for less?

How BIG Is Your Mess?

"Good order is the foundation of all good things." Edmund Burke.

When I was a philosophy professor, my office as was once described in Notre Dame Magazine as perhaps the messiest on campus. I liked to claim that the apparent disorder was just an extremely subtle and complex form of rational order beyond the comprehension of the casual glance. I was one of the early exponents of chaos theory. I was also a great rationalizer.

When I left the university and set up my own Morris Institute for Human Values, I quickly came to appreciate the value of order. A quirky, eccentric professor lost in the physical world can be not only tolerated, but even enjoyed within the safely protective environment of a major university. Out in the world, it’s a different matter. Any of us who are determined to create new forms of success have to respect the need for efficient access, clear records, and orderly procedures. If Architectural Digest wanted to photograph my office, it would still take me a few minutes, or - ok - maybe a few hours, over a period of days, to get it really nice looking, but it’s not the waste dump of resource materials and old book drafts that my chaotic professorial den once was.

How’s the order in your life? The degree of order and clear structure that you need will be a function of the person you are. Not everyone has to have labels on all drawers and a system for everything. There's a spectrum. But on the total mess end of the spectrum, I do believe that a measure of potential effectiveness is seriously inhibited, regardless of what absent minded creatives may think when they're ignoring it. 

Are you often wasting time looking for things that should be more rationally organized and more readily available? Would an uncluttered desk help you think better? And how about that old closet? Do you really have any idea what's in there? 

Philosophers have often been the closet organizers of the mind. We help people straighten up their thinking, get their ideas well ordered, and discover the treasures that may be hidden away within the deep and cluttered storage of their own minds.

Creativity flourishes best within a context of good order. So do we as people. Organize something, anything in your life, and enjoy the results that will come.

Today.

Our Daily Routines

Whatever your daily routine is, it's important to remember that there are immense numbers of people alive today whose routines are radically different. It helps us all to keep in mind the vast differences that exist on earth, the amazingly divergent lifestyles that flourish, and the variety of beliefs and assumptions that keep people going. We could all benefit from an expanded mindset, a broader sense of what's possible, what is, and what could be.

It could well be that your routine is exactly right for you, that it will help you to be and do your best in the world. Or it could be, instead, that you need to open your mind and broaden your sense of the possible. We all get in ruts. We all have habits of thought, as well as action. But an expansion of these thoughts and actions can often be a good and beneficial thing.

Wouldn't it be amazing if we could live with the ongoing realization that we're all here to learn and to contribute our own syntheses of understandings to the larger whole? The longer I live, the more convinced I am that there is no one exactly like you, or me, and that if we make the most of our uniqueness, in a positive way, we can change the world for the better, regardless of our jobs, our incomes, our place in the great scheme of things, or the ways others might view us.

Open yourself today. Embrace possibilities. And make your mark.