On rebellion, ideology and growing up. Lily Burana

Maybe every single generation goes thorough something like this (from I Love a Man in Uniform):

Of course, I was only a fraction of the rebel I used to be, having come to favor country music just as much as Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. Sometime in my early twenties, I had realized that punk rock might not be able to deliver on its messianic zeal. Even my idol, Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra, had started sounding less like a mordant political wit than a cranky old man shouting, “Hey you kids, get off my lawn!” In one of his later songs, he asked a question that echoed my own doubt: “Anarchy sounds great, but who would fix the sewers?”

I mourned the loss of my outlier faith as much as I welcomed the drift inward from the margins. The punk scene wasn’t hallowed ground or some infallible brain trust, it was just a bunch of strivers flailing around in search of answers, no better (though surely no worse) than anyone else. The far-flung dream of anarchy wore itself thin. Ideologically, I was fair game.

Mindsets and Carol Dweck

The woman in the picture is Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., a professor in the Psychology department at Stanford University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Over two years ago, I read an article about Prof. Dweck’s work in the Stanford Magazine. Today, I finally read her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, which I happen to own in an autographed copy purchased at the Stanford Bookstore.

Just like research on leadership behaviors, there is so much in Prof. Dweck’s research that resonates with what most leaders eventually learn at the school of hard knocks and we all wish we’d learned sooner. Because our behaviors, in the end, are rooted in our mindsets.

In a nutshell, people are usually of one of two mindsets. The “fixed mindset” maintains that people’s ability is innate and static; the “growth mindset” claims that ability is the result of hard work and a learning process. Each of us tends to apply one of these two beliefs, to other people as much as to ourselves, as we go through life; and this has far-reaching consequences for our success and our relationships with those around us.

Of course, empirical evidence from all sorts of fields (from neuroscience to athletic coaching) tells us that the brain has remarkable plasticity, that performance is far more likely to result from sustained effort, and that people are coachable. But they have to be open and willing to grow: no amount of coaching will improve performance if the subject is stuck in a “fixed mindset”. It has been proven experimentally that even toddlers have one of the two mindsets (I can certainly relate this to my own experience as a child, and some of my residual barriers as a grown-up); and that mindset strongly correlates with performance even when it is briefly and temporarily induced.

The book is filled with illustrations from the world of sports, business, and education; for example, it is interesting to contrast the career of a fixed-mindset athlete like John McEnroe with those of growth-mindset ones such as Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and many other less well-known athletes. But beyond this, there are some persuasive insights about how we could bring about societal change. For example, it is the combination of fixed mindsets with gender stereotyping that explain why many girls and young women who decide to pursue maths and science studies end up leaving the field. Only the women with the growth mindset feel a strong and stable sense of belonging and are able to maintain it in the face of challenges.

Read this diagram by Nigel Holmes about the two mindsets, and read the book if you’d like to learn more (if I’ve stimulated you into a growth mindset, so to speak). I’d love to hear whether it resonates with your experiences.

Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology
Department of Psychology, Stanford University

Leadership and Debra Benton

The woman in the picture is executive coach, speaker and author Debra (D.A.) Benton.

You know that leadership is something I think about a lot. One of the most useful reference frames about leadership I’ve ever heard (and I owe this one to a select group of Stanford faculty) is that it’s not practical to think of leadership as the product of intrinsic charisma you’re born with: if you deconstruct leadership, it boils down to a set of behaviors you choose to apply deliberately, consistently and relentlessly.

Debra is not an academic; I think her books are among the clearest and most usable guides to those behaviors. I met Debra a couple of times many years ago and we’ve occasionally stayed in touch over time. She lives and breathes what she preaches. You can even tell from reading her: she’s not just telling you to “use short, sharp sentences”: she does it.

Her latest book, CEO Material, re-uses some of the themes in her previous books – the basics of her teachings haven’t changed, after all – synthesized in a crisp package. It’s all about how you get to be described as “memorable, impressive, credible, genuine, trusted, liked, cool, calm, collected, charismatic, comfortable, competent, and confident.” And that’s the way she is. Sure, it’s hard work, and I’m particularly bad at some of it (smiling to strangers in an elevator, striking up a pleasant conversation with the person sitting next to you on the plane), and I don’t do it all. But what I do, I do because I believe it works.

One more thing I particularly like: Debra’s style teaches you to infuse reciprocity and exchange (the stuff that academics tell you influence is made of) with kindness, courtesy, decency and integrity. There’s no sustainable leadership without integrity. Make all the fun you want about American leadership literature as self-help for aspiring leaders. As long as there is a moral compass guiding those leadership behaviors, I’m fine with it.

On turning 40. Donald Justice and John Irving

The most creative birthday email I have received today quotes a poem by Donald Justice, as quoted in John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire, as well as the response by the protagonists’ brother Frank:

And, when Frank was forty, I would send him a birthday greeting with Donald Justice’s “Men at Forty” poem enclosed.

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

Frank fired me back a note saying he stopped reading the damn poem right there. “Close your own doors!” Frank snapped. “You’ll be forty soon enough. As for me, I bang the damn doors and come back to them all the fucking time.”

On family history: Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love

Remember Joan Didion and her family history? Here is another American writer, a younger one, Elizabeth Gilbert. She is the author of the successful Eat, Pray, Love – a book about a year she spent in Rome, an Indian ashram, and Bali.

Frankly, pure pleasure is not my cultural paradigm. I come from a long line of superconscientious people. My mother’s family were Swedish immigrant farmers, who look in their photographs like, if they’d ever even seen something pleasurable, they might have stomped on it with their hobnailed boots. (My uncle calls the whole lot of them “oxen.”) My father’s side of the family were English Puritans, those great goofy lovers of fun. If I look on my dad’s family tree all the way back to the seventeenth century, I can actually find Puritan relatives with names like Diligence and Meekness.

(Author photo: thanks to  Steve Jurvetson!)

Myself, I know of no such exotic names among my ancestors. I always assume that, if I went digging into those old and musty parish records, I would find generations and generations of unassuming names such as Maria and Giovanna.

In fact, my only relative of any notoriety seems to have been the Blessed Giovanna Maria Bonomo, who lived in the 17th century. (For readers with a non-Catholic education: a “blessed” – “beatus” or “beata” in Latin – is someone on the third of the four steps required to be canonized as a Catholic saint: see Beatification). A Benedectine nun since the age of 15, Giovanna Bonomo seems to have been a mystic and a hothead: considered a madwoman, she was denied the Holy Communion by her confessor, and for several years was not allowed not meet visitors in the parlatory or write letters. Later in life, as her ecstasies subsided (or maybe as her prayers to go into ecstasy only at night, so that she may live a normal life during the day, were answered), she was readmitted to her convent’s rites, and once rehabilitated performed many deeds of charity. In her last decades, she was elected abbess and prioress. Her most important teaching to her sisters, apparently, was that sanctity consists not in doing great things, but in doing simple and common things with perfect patience and dedication.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a statue of her was erected in the town of Asiago, in a small square facing the home where she is said to have been born. Of course, a few years later, the town was practically razed to the ground in a furious bombing, during the senseless carnage of World War I. When I was a child, one could still buy postcards showing her statue, miracolously standing in the middle of the rubble of the surrounding houses, unscathed, save for the broken tip of a little finger.

Where I Was From: Family history, by Joan Didion

Two reflections, my dear readers, prompted by reading the early chapters of Where I Was From, by the fearless Joan Didion (she of The Year of Magical Thinking). This post is on family history; the next one will be about California and federal money.

On family history
Didion’s memoir starts with a vivid recollection of her forebears, their countenance and character, and objects and mementos that belonged to them: “My great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Scott was born in 1766″… “I have, besides her recipes, a piece of appliqué she made on the crossing” … “I also have a photograph of the stone marker placed on the site of the cabin in which Nancy Hardin Cornwall and her family spent the winter of 1846-47″… “the old potato masher which the Cornwall family brought across the plains in 1846″… “a quilt made by my great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Anthony Reese”… “fifty shares of Transamerica stock”.

I wonder why so many Americans (outside the Mormons, for whom it is a religious calling) are so fond of digging way back into their family history. Sure, many have an ancestor who hurried to cross the Sierra Nevada before the winter snow, or one who came to Ellis Island with a cardboard suitcase, or one who had this or that story to tell to epitomize the triumph of the human spirit over adversity and such heroic feats of will. So, perhaps, their great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers are by definition more interesting than ours. I don’t even know the names of anybody who came before my grandparents. I own a single surviving recipe book in my maternal grandmother’s handwriting, and two of her finely embroidered tablecloths; from those generations and generations of earlier forebears I have no letters or diaries, no surviving artifacts, no stock certificates, and certainly no potato mashers. (The oldest family lore I can recall is an unverified rumor about my paternal grandmother hugging and kissing a black American soldier, on or about April 25, 1945.) We regular Europeans do not reconstruct our family trees as a hobby, we do not practice ancestor worship: unless we’re in the tiny minority who has inherited a castle in the Loire valley, say, and can stare at those people’s dusty portraits in our darkened halls, and sell their furniture.

Realistically, most of our forebears must have led unremarkable lives. I guess it would be possible to reconstruct these lives’ outlines through church archives: they were born and baptized, they married, they bore children who were in turn baptized, they died and were buried. For centuries and centuries, the monotony of agrarian life wore them down. They grew crops and brought them to market. Once in a while, they sold a pig or a calf. You see, unlike Joan Didion’s ancestors, my folks, I’m afraid, never went anywhere. It just wasn’t that common to up and go somewhere. Did one of my ancestors join the Crusades and see the Holy Land? Did one see China in the footsteps of Marco Polo? Did one travel North and learn to paint in the style of Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach? It just seems so unlikely. Historians, contradict me if I’m wrong, but I think that statistically, even through wars and famines and epidemics, most people stayed put. That was what life was like. And that’s why genealogy would bore most of us to tears. On average, our ancestors must have been unremarkable, or at least less enterprising than those who got on some boat and whose children went on to build America. The mobility gene packed up and left; we are the children of those who lacked it.

Perhaps, by taking for granted that there is nothing special to learn about our forebears, we do miss out on patterns, on clues to who we might be underneath our veneer of cultural sophistication. Joan Didion, reconstructing character from the flimsiest of clues, finds a dark thread running through her family:

They were women, these women in my family, without much time for second thoughts, without much inclination toward equivocation, and later, when there was time or inclination, there developed a tendency, which I came to see as endemic, toward slight and major derangements, apparently eccentric pronouncements, opaque bewilderment and moves to places not quite on schedule.

But then, were that to be the case for me too, wouldn’t I be better off not knowing?

Too social

Social advertising.
Social bookmarking.
Social calendaring.
Social marketplaces.
Social media.
Social music.
Social networking.
Social reviewing.
Social search.
Social shopping.
Social tagging.
Social travel.

I am not an antisocial person, but sometimes I feel the world has gotten rather too social for my taste, and I enjoy the occasional asocial weekend.

Best books about what it’s like to be old

In addition to the end-of-civilization meme, I seem to be very much attracted about books that talk about what it’s like to be old. I am not seriously preparing for Apocalypse, but the thought of preparing for old age does occur to me. Not that I read for that purpose explicitly; but perhaps there is a hint of foresight in preferring to learn about what’s ahead, rather than to reminisce in what’s been left behind.

Here, in no particular order, a few books on the topic.

• The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood. Delightful.
• A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Marina Lewycka. Somewhat whimsical, but with more than a ring of truth behind the farcical surface.
• Exit Ghost, Philip Roth. For the lowdown on what it’s like to be impotent and incontinent and unwilling to accept it.
• Saturday, Ian McEwan. An Alzheimer’s patient, from her son’s point of view.
• Elegy for Iris, John Bayley. A real – not a fictional – Alzheimer’s patient, author and philosopher Iris Murdoch. In her husband’s words.
• Slow Man, J. M. Coetzee.
• Man in the Dark, Paul Auster.

What would you add? Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien, perhaps?

Cochlear implants, luddism and unnecessary suffering

If you know someone who wears a cochlear implant, you know what a difference it makes in their quality of life. Yet, research by prof. Huggy Rao of Stanford Business School shows that adoption of the technology was appallingly slow due to cultural resistance:

[...] the deaf rights movement slowed adoption of the cochlear implant—thought of by its makers as a cure for deafness because children who used it could more easily acquire language skills—by painting it as an innovation that presaged the loss of sign language and the destruction of the deaf community. In France, for example, a deaf coalition called Sourds en Colère (Deaf Anger) organized demonstrations against doctors who promoted cochlear implants [...] [Deaf rights groups] used unconventional techniques—such as performing mime skits depicting French doctors performing operations on blood-covered children—to arouse public interest.

Recession, adversity, resilience

Media pundits and financial commentators debate whether we are merely in a recession or in a Depression, one of those with a capital D. The debate will go on for a while; yet, how could we ever believe our generation would never get one of the big ones, or more?

I remember oil shocks and terrorism in the 1970s, and the uncertainty and fear of the Years of Lead. Our family moved to Munich just after the Black September massacre; the kidnapping of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades is still a vivid personal memory, strongly intertwined with our family history. Before that, my father had been a child during World War II, and I cannot ever shake the belief that his savings habits and his frugality were drilled into him and his five siblings as a result of wartime restrictions. My grandparents lived through World War I; a military cemetery not far from where where we used to vacation during my childhood holds the spoils of 54,000 soldiers, most of them unidentified, from that senseless carnage.

Yet, stereotypically, I also think that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And the strongest of us will be those who have battled personal adversity in addition to economic and social crisis. America’s new likely Secretary of State did not take to the bottle after her husband’s infidelity and lies became a matter of public record. Yahoo’s new CEO didn’t stay in a hospital bed very long as she was fighting breast cancer.

Not that I wish you, my dear readers, any of those events. But should they happen (and bad things often do, so make sure you have friends to fall back on), I wish you the personal resilience to fight through them and come out a winner.