What's It All About, Alfie?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Ballet-dancer_01.jpg

After yet another too-early wake-up powered by anxiety about college, I browsed through my Facebook links and found this short video by Dr. Ned Hallowell about raising successful children. If you don't want to watch, which takes about 9 minutes, you can skip right to my insightful summary.

Video Spotlight No. 10 | OPEN, The News and Discussion Blog of Avenues: The World School

What does he mean by successful? What we all mean, really, when it comes down to it: happy, healthy, productive, engaged in society, moral.

How to Live

image via Wikipedia through Creative Commons

I once considered majoring in Classics. For some reason, admitting this embarrasses me. Probably because it reminds me of my huge, thick glasses and my complete set of railroad tracks, and my adolescent earnestness in search of Wisdom. I distinctly recall telling my interviewer at Wellesley that I'd like to start a Latin club.

Which I did not. I took a final semester of Latin. I'd been hoping for a class on Catullus' dirty poetry; but they didn't offer it. A semester translating 80-line chunks of Pastoral poetry was the fork in the road for me.

What I loved about the classics, though, was that all these guys were busy thinking about how to live, a topic that appealed to me then as much as it does now. Although most of those guys were Greek, and I didn't read Greek. I read them in English.

I touched on this in another post—how it’s easier to admit to materialism (I love my iPhone4s)  than to an interest in wisdom or meditation or things that might be grouped under spirituality.  That in our culture—or at least in my subsection of it—that kind of talk just doesn’t happen. You’ve got your psychological and your rational and your political conversations. It’s harder to get to those other kind,  the How to Live conversations.

So the other day I came across a book called How to Live in our local indie bookstore. It’s by Sarah Bakewell. How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty-One Attempts at an Answer.

How could I resist? It's philosophy, after a fashion, not self-help. But, after all, the essense of most of these self-help books on success is really about how to live in a way that makes success more likely. And that way usually involves delving into what really matters to you, what is most important, so that you can shape your goals around that.

What is Worse than Failure?

Emerson's Study. Photo by Benjamin F. Mills, Boston. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Someone asked me the other day how to reconcile Deepak Chopra's idea that we each have something unique to give the world and it's our job to find it with the reality that some people don't seem to find that unique something.

She was thinking of her mother, now in her 70s, who's frozen in a state of not exactly misery, but of futility. Stuck with the idea that there's nothing much left for her to do or be. Limited. Let's call it limited. And this woman, the daughter, feels there's so much possibility for her mother, only her mother doesn't see it.

I can think of people I know like that.

Can a Dilettante Be Successful?

It's school vacation in our state, so I don't have time for a long blog post. I'm too busy visiting family and reopening psychic wounds to post anything long. On the plus side, perhaps there will be fodder for future posts to excavate from the effects.

But I am thinking about this. A friend of mine, who is decidedly successful professionally--you can tell because now she is a consultant--mentioned that she often feels dissatisfied with herself. She said she finds that she's always thinking about her weaknesses, so that she can improve those areas, and balance out her skills.  Whereas men she knows, entrepreneurs and professionals, don't worry about areas they might be weak in; they focus on what they're good at and interested in, and keep on building on it.

Finding the Sock

I was in labor with my first child. Contractions, fear, anxiety, and excitement rippled through me. The husband had my suitcase. The bed was made. Our one-bedroom-with-a-den apartment was tidied. I was all ready to go.

Then I saw a sock on the floor. It seemed, in my contracting and anxiety-ridden state, too hard to bend over and pick it up--and I am proud to say it also seemed too niggling a detail about which to bother the husband.


I'll get that when we get home, I thought.

And I went and had the baby. Which, as you can imagine, based what you know of me, was a totally trauma-free experience from which I got out of bed and danced a tarantella within twenty-four hours.

Average Perfect Day

Aside from providing some good laughs for me and the husband, a couple of Noah St. John's theories of success, have stuck with me, like rice grains wedged in the crevass between the burner and the stovetop. In a  previous post I talked about his "loving mirrors," about how if you're trying out a new idea, having a trustworthy friend there to tell you it's a good idea is better than psyching yourself up in a vacuum. Having someone you believe in believe in you can be just the nudge you need to get yourself unstuck.

Habit #3, The Fruit of Your Labors

Now that I've zeroed in on my personal mission statement and know my true values and have a principle-centered life, like a good little doobie, I am ready for Habit #3 of Highly Effective People, which is quite simply, Put First Things First.

This is the time management piece, Covey's way. He's got a helpful diagram:

I love that he thinks my time can be apportioned in this nice, neat way. And yours, too.