The Question Will Make Your Problem More Interesting

This Question Will Make Your Problems More Interesting
Limitations shouldn’t stop you from winning

Under my other voices heading I present to you an article,  brought to my attention by friend Michael Kelley a fellow collaborator on male educational objectives and experiences. Michael resides in Atlanta Georgia.

Gustavo Razzetti is the blog writer of this article that was found in Medium Digest. 
Razzetti is an Author and Speaker. Who calls himself “a Change Instigator. Culture Transformation & Innovation Strategist.”  He has a new Book and you can find it at http://bit.ly/StretchChange
 

Le Mans race Audi diesel car winner and crew

Audi was in desperate need to win the 2006 edition of the 24 hours of Le Mans race. The competition is not only one of the most prestigious car races in the world — its outcome can make or break a carmaker’s reputation.

However, Audi was in real trouble: its car was not fast enough.

Until one question changed everything. The Audi team went from not having the fastest car to winning the 24-hours Le Mans race three years in a row.

If you were to design a race car, you’d probably want to build the fastest one possible, right?

Interestingly enough, Audi took a different approach. One that brought to life the power of accepting constraints. And turned them into a superpower, not a limitation.

The Story of an Interesting Question

Interesting questions trigger thought-provoking conversations — that’s what Audi did by reframing its challenge.

“How could we win Le Mans if our car could go no faster than anyone else’s?” — Audi’s chief engineer asked.

The chief engineer’s question not only removed the excuse— not having the fastest car should not stop them from winning. He also reframed the challenge into a more interesting one.

Rather than worrying about the speed of the car, Audi’s team had to discover other ways to win the race.

The 24 hours of Le Mans is one of the most challenging races. Teams have to deal with physical and mental fatigue while balancing demanding speeds with keeping their car running for a full day.

The design team came up with a simple yet powerful solution: a fuel-efficient car. Audi turned conventional wisdom upside down by using a diesel engine for the first time. By reducing the amount of pit stops, the racing team saved significant time — they could never make up that time by increasing engine power.

The engineering team approached Le Mans as an endurance competition —one closer to a marathon than a sprint.

This new perspective helped Audi win Le Mans three years in a row.

Limitations shouldn’t stop you from winning

Winning is not just about what you do during the race. Everything that you do leading to that day matters. That mentality helped Audi turn its constraints into creative fuel.

Most people see their constraints as limiting. When their resources are scarce, they feel limited.

However, not being the ‘fastest car’ shouldn’t prevent you from winning.

Everyone has limitations. Winning is not about having all the resources; it’s about outsmarting your competition.

Don’t let your constraints define you. That’s the purpose of this one question — turn your constraints into a superpower.

“How can you win if ‘your car’ is not faster than everyone else’s?”

Apply this mentality to solve both personal and work challenges.

How can you win if you are NOT…

… the smartest guy in the room?

… the one with the strongest network?

… the most well-known expert?

… the (add the limitation you want)?

The point is: don’t get stuck in the “I can’t win” mode just because of your constraints.

When you focus on what you lack, you become a victim.

“Why is this happening to me?” — You might ask yourself. You feel life is unfair and let one constraint define your future. And, eventually, you give up.

You can opt to fight back. However, this is an endless battle. Being obsessed over defeating your constraints takes your focus away.

Instead of fighting your limitations, ask more interesting questions. Like Audi’s chief engineer did.

Take ownership — accept your limitations rather than wasting your time fighting reality. Your purpose is not to defeat your constraints but to achieve your goals. Ask yourself: “How can I win the race even if I’m not the fastest?” Focus on turning a constraint into a superpower.

Outsmart others by reframing how you will win the race.

Moving from being a victim to hero is not easy. It requires self-awareness; to stop comparing to others and challenge what you can do differently.

When you can’t win within normal conditions, rewrite the rules.

Reframe your challenges into interesting ones

Focus on the opportunity, not on your limitations.

When you try to get more of what you lack— resources, support, budget, time, etc. — you get stuck in trying to solve the wrong problem.

Reframing the problem will help you uncover a more interesting one to solve.

Audi’s chief engineer turned a constraint (speed) into a superpower (energy efficiency). He reframed the problem from “we are not faster than others” to “how can we win without being the fastest.”

Reframing the challenge is half of the solution. When you stop thinking about your weaknesses, you stop comparing to others.

This question will help you reframe a constraint and turn it into a challenge: “How might I achieve (a goal) even though I lack (a limitation)?”

Reframe your challenge into a more interesting one.

Become the hero of your own narrative. Focus your creativity on the right problem. Your goal is not to build the fastest car, your goal is to win the race.

Turn your limitations in your favor rather than surrendering to them.

Masculinity Is It The Problem or A Programed Expectation?

Samson by Ernst Fuchs sharded by William Floyd

This blog came about due to conversations and comments sent to me about my March 2018 blog post, which was titled ‘A Conversation on Masculinity, Society, and Change” located in the Male on Man section of SiteOfContact. I thank my faithful readers for their comments, responses, and interest in the subject.  This article also takes on its particular tone of delivery, due to a deep probing conversation with a client over an article written by David de las Morena’s from his Website called: “How to Beast,” his blog titled - “ How to Increase Masculine Energy and Rebuild Self-Esteem.” (At the end of this piece you will find the link to David’s blog article

I really don't want to get into a critique of Mr. Morena's concepts especially his concept of 'No More Mr. Nice Guy'  other than to say it was the touchstone for my client and myself to engage in a deeper conversation on 'Masculinity and Gender.' David de las Morena ’s comments. per se. have more to do with self-respect and self-worth, rather than perhaps a focus on a root cause of gender (mis)label. Personally, I must warn you that some may find David's manner of expression distasteful and rude, yet beyond his style as a 'straight heterosexual,' he does make one or two valid suggestions to gain self-respect and self-worth.   But again that is not my central theme. I am wanting to address  the early social conditioning that gets associated with expected behavior or expected gender patterns coming to us as early as our  nursery days, and in the stories we are told which we then (mis)label as "masculine."  

What is Masculinity? How is it measured? What are its demands? And how is that person meant to look, think, act, and feel? and should that be according to the mores of society?

We have a lot of opinions about being a “Man” or more to the point having “Masculinity “.  Now to surprise you, you could say Masculinity is not, gender-specific, I say this because I have known some masculine women, including my Mom (not to look at her), but that woman had balls.  This is all to say, what are we focusing on?  The word, or is it behaviors that get labeled as Masculinity?

Masculinity comes up a lot lately and unfortunately, you can expect it to be related to trauma in an experience. Or sometimes in ‘How’ to integrate the Masculine aspect of oneself into a more positive and holistic lifestyle

This piece of writing is not to diminish any circumstance where trauma has occurred, we can all see how under various circumstances the word masculinity has been misrepresented by men caught in stereotypes, causing the word to lose luster, respect, and aliveness. We could say Masculinity is lost due to diminished meaning.

I could see how some people can be caught up in the illusion that to be masculine only meant to be aligned with bathroom bullies; politicized pulpits; with privilege; overt racism or sexism; or with bigotry toward groups of people. That kind of action portrayed by a few men is not a true representation of Masculinity, and yes if that is a view of the word, it needs to be tanked in the toilet.

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I have seen, in my work as a life coach, the effect of the above description of what masculinity misrepresented can do to some men, for example, the issues of self-worth become diminished. Abandonment and loss of manhood become issues. Male childhood developmental trauma, which can color men’s interactions with other men and women. The clue to the problem is "early childhood trauma." 

This is not the first time in history were maleness appeared to be vilified. I can recollect in my own history, in the 1950’ s, being taunted by a younger sister who loved to recite repeatedly, a portion of an old nursery rhyme called “What are folks made of?” by Robert Southey writen in 1842.  The segments of the rhyme my sister loved to taunt me with was the portion called - "What are little boys made of?"  and “what are girls made of?”

What are little boys made of?
Slugs and snails
And puppy-dogs’ tails,
That’s what little boys are made of.
And what are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And all things nice,

That’s what little girls are made of.

This was a common nursery rhyme of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This rhyme deserves our attention in part, due to its negative descriptors of the male gender, described as slugs, snails, snips, and frogs depending on where in the world the rhyme was told.

The rhyme by Southey in two additional verses goes on to say:

What are young men made of, made of? 
          What are young men made of? 
Sighs and leers and crocodile tears; 
          That's what young men are made of.

What are young women made of, made of?  
What are young women made of? 
           Rings and jings and other fine things
     Sugar and spice and all things nice; 
          That's what young women are made of.   
 

I think you get the jest of it...

Nursery Rhymes play key roles in how we explain to children our cultural attitudes about themselves and gender behavior. Reciting Nursery Rhymes to children is one of a series of first steps to providing children's education about self-esteem and what is expected of them.

It can implant gender shame and things not good in the youngest minds of our society before (arguably) they have the critical function to question such assumptions and provides children with ideas of masculinity and femininity to which they may well not conform (thank heavens) yet creating a pressure towards adopting gender stereotypes which, frankly, toddling tots could have done without.  Here is a place to start, with a new vision, stories, and Nursery Rhymes.

These new stories, to be made then in part for the cultural socialization process,  would not expect transgressions of young males but does expect exploration, and do not dismiss and expect ‘boys to be bad, and then require them to do more 'to prove themselves otherwise.' While shaping young girls into passive restrained toys that need do nothing but be pretty for worry not you can do nothing wrong attitudes, that does not prepare them for a life of diverse opportunity that may not always need sweetness and passivity. These  kinds of stories had fallacy, any conscious mother of children of both sexes could debunk and tell you that, 'it was a  pile of the well-known stuff.'   

The bad behavior displayed in teen males may come from early unconscious childhood expectations. Expectations that come from the nursery. A more positive model is needed to be created and employed.  Nursery rhymes that re-imagine, re-envision, and ground masculinity in a self-affirming way.

Often a male child, if traumatized by his childhood environment is then expected to, on his own, “get over it, “to “outgrow” it, or somehow zap it away.  Yet it is that very trauma that will freeze him into isolation, into not seeking help, into not allowing himself to talk about it.  because he feels it is expected of him to bear up especially if viewed by other males. Yet, there are some things that happen to men that they never “get over,” and must reach out to their culture and other men to correct the concept.

So, to refocus this discussion for the conscious adults amongst us, I ask, that Masculinity not be looked at as the Problem, but perhaps as your Expectation?

If it is the Expectation, then where did that expectation come from? A change of the approach, to re-envision Masculinity is needed.  We must begin by realizing that both males and females are comprised of Male and Female components or as Carl Jung called it Anima and Animus. We are both Masculine and Feminine in attributes, some of us more of one than the other and by God, we should not all try and fit a cookie cutter visions of what that is going to manifest as. It is not one definition fits all.

Okay, we have Men,  beyond the age of nursery rhymes, that have the pressures to refashion a new sense of them-self, of self-being.  Let's be bold here and strip everything away and start with an identity as individuation of consciousness, with emotional intelligence. This concept is of course for the person who wants to have dominion over their own life, then he can start by  re-inhabiting his maleness even in the face of disturbing experiences, as he then weaves a more "integrated" narrative of his life for himself.  Re-authoring the sacred story of ‘who am I’ and calling forth a new future for himself not yet known

Trusting the worth and validity of his expression of masculinity, and in that expression a self-love, that will be able to soften the callus wounds of the body, mind and the heart, embracing a fully realized masculinity by his design a vision of masculinity, designed for him by him, so it becomes alive within his being as a force for good. This allows for a profound empowerment, that for anyone is revolutionary, if lucky enough even contain bits of humor, and sometimes bold in its persona. These skills will be needed to then start writing and telling  the New nursery stories for those yet unborn.

The goal then is not some fixed, “cured” state where we have successfully purged masculinity which is an aspect of our self-experience from what we are, as if it were some wretched foreign substance, but rather to find a larger home for it within our concept of the self. Slowly, we can allow what has become frozen and solidified to thaw and become flexible. To make the masculine force rightly seen within us and children to come, as a valued and balanced energy.  A refocus of our attention and thoughts, to break out of that cycle of trauma, blame, and shame. To move towards a balanced identity, that has a stable, and positive context for humans with masculinity, who are given an expectation to be a force for life-sustaining good.

David de las Morena’s Blog post - https://www.howtobeast.com/how-to-reclaim-your-manhood-and-rapidly-cultivate-masculine-energy/

A Conversation On Masculinity, Society, and Change Neither is Static

THE KEYS TO WORRY-FREE CHANGING NOTION OF GENDER, MASCULINITY, & SOCIETY -  THE EDGE COMES FROM KNOWING 'What’s Behind the Curtin'. By Calvin Harris H.W., M.

The Life and Age of Man: The Stages of Man's Life from Cradle to ...
FAMSF Explore the Art - Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

This post is written to give a ‘Breathing space’ or a broader view to men when issues come up in the matter of Gender identification, the notions of your sexuality vs gender or in the matter of having to defend or change in a time of Societal change. I will start with the comment that if changes are demanded of you and you did not instigate the change, then make note someone else has an agenda or profit to be gained by it.  

The impetus for writing this post began with a call. I got this phone call about an article that was to appear in the March 1st or 2nd, 2018, edition of TheNation.Com, in its SOCIETY Blog Column. A post titled: "Do We Need to Redefine Masculinity—or Get Rid of It?", written by one Collier Meyerson, a Knobler Fellow at the Nation Institute, where she focuses on reporting about race and politics, as well as an investigative fellow at Reveal. Even before the articles came out a call came to me to be on the lookout for it and a request for my reaction to the article. Since its release, I have had a barrage of calls with hot opinions about it, more than any article (to date) generated from any posts that I had written myself. (Well, it is my own fault for encouraging you all to read more, and then to dig deep for understanding.)

I feel, to meet a storm successfully you will need an edge, that is, a preparation and / or history of the behaviors of the storms and how they behaved in the past: that is where the edge to success is found. So for all of you who are ready to Take Action one way or another, let me play devil's advocate here and let’s start with the meaningful action of an investigation. This investigation may seem a bit around the bend but hold fast, for the future is at stake.

Be pre-warned this article, may have intellectual and emotional undercurrents for some; those of you that take the time to digest and discern what is being offered will find it well worth the read. I welcome your comments and for those of you having regular scheduled session with me, I welcome your phone calls regarding personal issues brought up by this post.  

Also, contain at the end of this article is a link to Ms. Meyerson's article for your perusal and consideration.

I am a believer in having a shameless array of ‘Conscious’ emotions, considered in this conversation when the goal is to lead to a compassionate solution. Yes, even the emotion Anger, if that anger is self-possessed within an idea. The goal then, as Thanissara Mary Weinberg expresses it, is to have - “Anger . . . traditionally thought of to be close to wisdom. [To be used], When not projected outward onto others or inward toward the self, it gives us the necessary energy and clarity to understand what needs to be done.”
Now, I, in fact, was happy to see an article on masculinity in a publication like ‘The Nation,’ in light of my post last year in SOC on 30, June 2017, titled “A Man Is Expected - New Pathways of Being.” Yet, I was surprised by the title implications to Redefine Masculinity or get rid of it. Let’s face it, there are not too many women nor men that really want to get rid of Masculinity. So let us knock off the nonsense of getting rid of it and try to reason to the core of the matter.

It's clear when you look out into society that masculinity is a tough subject to approach for many people, regardless of gender, but it seems it is popping up in one form or another and therefore it wants to be addressed.

 I'm afraid beliefs about male and female, that is humans and their rights are being turned upside down and that some of the discussions of the new masculinity reflect more theory first than any real consideration of human progress or history on the subject. I don't think it's the wisest move to redefine what it means to be anything beyond Conscious Beings right now. Radicals could easily turn beliefs about humans and unalienable rights they possess upside down especially in a climate demanding change. 

It may surprise some to know in a very short number of years it will be a moot point.  The rage and outcry in the courts, will be about abuse in the use of Robots and Inanimate Objects and there again the consideration for redefinition.  This time for Robots being Sentient Beings, that means beings with consciousness, or in some contexts life itself. Sentient beings for the longest time where considered primary a state belonging only to Humans.  To be Sentient you needed to possess five aggregates: matter, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. As technology and science progressed as rapidly as it has identification of sentient beings have been extended to animals and plant life and will in time move to our machines. At some point, regulated behavior in the use or misuse of Robots and inanimate objects as Sex objects will prevail. 

What it means to be a man or a woman can be reduced to just saying  ‘Human.’ We have the capacity to think, feel, perceive or experience subjectively and with empathy.  When we go beyond that, then we start to get into trouble when like the Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to separate, distinguish as it were the ability to think from the ability to feel and maybe where we start some of the modern divisions of men and women. Humans are carbon-based communal societal creatures that have empathy and justice called Love within their somatic DNA and within their shared blood, they as for now, come with a knowledge of an expiration date.

Photo by Jason Beamguard

 The Blade Runner movies and the book that they were adapted from,  “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by writer Philip K. Dick, first published in 1968, explored issues of “what does it mean to be human.” The fallacy the book tried to point to was the belief that Androids, unlike humans, are said to possess no sense of empathy or compassion in the future, and the question did humans still contain humanity. I would start the conversation here because for some folks The concept of masculinity mis-seen is the belief that masculinity in the male gender has no empathy or compassion. And thus masculinity in the male gender is a mechanical apparatus that can be turned on or off at will. Rather than it being an evolutionary engineered process once geared to the benefit of family,  community or humanity and has historically been manipulated but yet is always evolving.

Man as Machine

There is a book mention in Ms. Meyerson blog by Gail Bederman: her seminal book is on the issue, "Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917." Author Gail Bederman writes: “I don’t see manhood as either an intrinsic essence or a collection of traits, attributes, or sex roles. Manhood—or ‘masculinity,’ as it is commonly termed today—is a continual, dynamic process.” The first thing we need to do, according to Bederman, is stop arguing that masculinity has traits that are inherent. “Gender,” she writes, “is dynamic and always changing.”

Book Cover of Gail Bederman  Book

Between 1820 and 1860, according to Bederman, more and more white men were beginning to identify as middle class: entrepreneurs, professionals, and managers. And with that distinction, there came about a new and important gender identification for men, one that centered around civility. As opposed to brutishness or violent tendencies, manliness during this period was focused on a civilized character, holding off on marriage to accrue wealth. And then a man should focus on providing a good life for his wife, his children, or his employees.

Between 1879 and 1910, the number of middle-class men who were self-employed dropped, from 67 percent to 37 percent, prompting another a shift. “Middle-class Victorian men were obsessed with manhood at the turn of the century,” writes Bederman. They became “obsessed” with cowboy novels, and hunting and fishing. At the same time new epithets, like “sissy,” “pussy-foot,” “cold feet” and “stuffed shirt, ” emerged, indicating “behavior which had once appeared self-possessed and manly but now seemed over-civilized and effeminate,” writes Bederman. Around 1890, a noun defined as “the essence of manhood” took hold for the first time—now, manhood was called “masculinity.”

The idea, Bederman says, was that being “manly” had a “moral dimension,” and was defined by a dictionary at the time as “possessing the proper characteristic of a man; independent in spirit or bearing; strong, brave, large-minded, etc.” But then, when the economy tanked between 1879 to 1896, and with it the whole middle-class white-male “civilized” identity, the concept of “manliness” shifted again. After that, Bederman says, when men wished to invoke a male power they used “masculine” and “masculinity” to describe it. “The adjective ‘masculine’ was used to refer to any characteristics, good or bad, that all men had,” she wrote. The element of morality had been left behind.

The shift in white middle-class American male identification at the turn of the 19th century was also a way to justify white supremacy. “Linking whiteness to male power,” Bederman wrote, “was nothing new.… during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, American citizenship rights had been construed as ‘manhood’ rights which inhered to white males, only…Negro males, whether free or slave, were forbidden to exercise ‘manhood’ rights—forbidden to vote, hold electoral office, serve on juries, or join the military. The conclusion was implicit but widely understood: Negro males, unlike white males, were less than men.” But once “masculinity” came around at the end of the 19th century, and black men were fighting for “manhood rights,” a new idea had emerged. White middle-class men were starting to see themselves as maintaining a universal male quality: savagery. But the way they separated themselves from their black counterparts, was to articulate that they had evolved more. Bederman uses the example of National Geographic, which was first published in 1889 and gained popularity “by breathlessly depicting the heroic adventures of ‘civilized’ white male explorers among ‘primitive tribes in darkest Africa.” Similarly, she writes, “Anglo-Saxonist imperialists insisted that civilized white men had a racial genius for self-government which necessitated the conquest of more ‘primitive’ darker races.”

America’s new definition of masculinity was cemented during the 20th century. Though black men gained the right to vote, under Jim Crow laws, which last well into the mid-20th century, they continued to be subjugated by white men, who restrained black men’s economic possibilities and frequently portrayed them as uncontrollable rapists. From early westerns to the action films we watch today, white cis men overwhelmingly were cast as leads in the mass entertainment our culture consumes; guns became a rite and plaything of young white men in our country. And masculinity became a made-up excuse to dominate.

In his essay, Michael Ian Black. an American comedian, actor, writer, writes: “I believe in boys. I believe in my son. Sometimes, though, I see him, 16 years old, swallowing his frustration, burying his worry, stomping up the stairs without telling us what’s wrong, and I want to show him what it looks like to be vulnerable and open, but I can’t. Because I was a boy once, too.”

Black can’t show his son what vulnerability looks like not because he is biologically incapable of doing so. The block is one formed by habit, culture, and American history predicated on white male domination—which produced a masculinity predicated on white male domination. Who says we have to hold onto that? It is only with the understanding that gender identification is moveable, malleable, and worth undoing that we can begin to make the boys all right.

A change of Role

Tim Marshal & Son

Modifications to masculinity should be a personal and individual choice, to be made by the male or female in their own exploration of their life. Based on their journey to discover their innate self and to get their answer to the great question Who Am I. No one should decide but that individual themselves. They will need of course historic and scientific facts, to be able to look behind the curtain, as well as support both for their spirit and their bodies by their communities. To find that innate self and then to offer their unique contribution to family, community, society and the world.  

This would mean no more expectations of a  cookie cutter assembly line version of masculinity, or of what it should look like or do. No more of a one version fits all.  More of a self-made version of what I call male on man(kind). In my work, I look for the essence in each person I interact with, people to engage their individual merit, on a person by person basis. I have found it seems to work better than applying labels - at least for me.

Freedom to be You

See the Nation article by Collier Meyerson

A hiki i kekahi manawa  =   Until next time
 

A Monthly Tool to the Self Directed Life

2018: Working Your Plan From Interior Motivation

This March, Site of Contact's Starts a Monthly Guide to steer or invoke question or directions for your search for meaning or reward in your life.  This month the concept of Goals and maybe some thoughts about them you have not considered before.

Goal are all about Consciously Doing, as any good coach will tell you, the goal focus is maintain by conscious - frequency, consistency, and intensity, this is the triangle elements of successful goal training.

But before you begin, flesh out what passions are in the loins, that will drive your goals for 2018. Is it to become a better person, such as in: Being healthier and stronger, or maybe more innovative, or entrepreneurial in business, or obtaining and displaying more Life skills, or just simply being a better friend or family member?

I suggest writing down what you have decided.  Every few months going over them to see if they are still valid or has there been some kind of alteration or have they been disregarded or replaced all together, for it is okay to make changes or alterations as your  awareness of yourself grows.

I get from the emails and phone calls we received, many of you have begun doing just that. Many who started this type of exercise in 2017 have reported things being better, and more efficient for themselves, yet for others of you, this has not gone so well. I understand that you found new behaviors were needed in your life to manifest your goals, and trying to stick to the triangle elements of successful goal training was tough. So, let's step backup and reconsider your goals in light of the creation and maintenance of new habits.  

Question, why do you want to achieve that goal in the first place? Simple question, but at the heart of it is the key to the matter of sustaining new habits. Goals should not be just because you think you should do them. That "wanting to do it” attitude may be the ticket to working harder at it, rather than gaining real results. Maybe the cart is in front of the horse, meaning maybe you don’t have your purpose or objective for the goal framed correctly in your own head.

Make sure that the goal is in alignment with your higher purpose in life.With each goal will come time invested in new habits It’s tough to sustain effort and find reward in something, when you’re only doing it because you "think" you will impress people or that they expect it or would approve of you for it. It's your life, so make sure you're spending your time on things that challenge the notion of what is important to you. The common mistake you want to avoid can be summed up by the statement from an author and former dot-com business executive, Seth Godin when he said,

“Your audacious life goals are fabulous. We’re proud of you for having them. But it’s possible that those goals are designed to distract you from the thing that is really frightening you—the shift in daily habits that would mean a re–invention of how you see yourself.” - Seth Godin

So if you need to get a handle on this or in moving forward give me a call. We can go over or discover activities, habits, and techniques, without harassment or harsh judgment that is advantageous to a solid re-invention of a successful you. 

The Odd Way We Define Success

By Calvin Harris, H.W., M.

Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, and Gary Merrill in All About Eve (1950)

How often do we hear about successful people, then imagine we fall short by comparison?

In my coaching practice, when Clients ask me how they can become successful? I reach for one of several canned questions to create a dialogue to an answer:

• Short and sweet: “Do you work for yourself?”
• Ambitious: “If you did not have worries about obligations or money what would you do?”
• Mysterious: “Is there a difference in focus in a man of success. Compared to becoming a person of value?” 
• Awkward: "Your focus is it chasing the money or chasing the passion?"

If I’m lucky, the conversation moves the other person to return to their inner dialogue of themselves, to uncover more of the root cause for the question, and to help them frame an answer to their vague subjective question or at least see the underpinning or gauge to their unsatisfied state of being.

Tesla car

I half joking say to them, Oh I can understand your feeling, because on the one hand, I am a successful entrepreneurial mentor, life coach, writer, and more. But on the other hand, I’m none of them, if I used your gauge, because based on your gauge, then shouldn’t a writer have a large following of loyal fans? Shouldn’t a life coach have only high paying clients? Isn’t an entrepreneur supposed to make deals while whipping along in his Tesla through the fashionable sections of SoCal’s Coast Highway?

That’s success, right? And if not, why do you seem to think it is?

Here’s the thing. I’ve noticed that everyone I read, listen to, or follow on social media is unusually accomplished, if only in hype. This is bound to happen. The most prolific people, even if not talented, will get the most attention.

I mean, they’re the best at getting promotion. It’s no surprise they have a large following.

But what then happens to most of us? We hear about these promoted “successful” people, then imagine we fall short by comparison. I call this the Comparing Mind.

How do you respond to others' lives? Have you felt compelled to look over your shoulder and compare yourself to family members, best buds, classmates, neighbors, or someone you've read about, and believe that you have to equal whatever they did in their lives?

The first thing to understand is to know that to some degree the Comparing Mind switches on in all of us. Like it or not, our comparison software will always be running in the background. Now to mediate the absurdity of the Comparing Mind, we want to be mindful and with a lightness of humor, that our lives require a rigorous discernment of which voices to listen to: those coming from our own depths of purpose, or those which are received from the promotional blast of the world around us.

I recall a conversation that took place during a business meeting, that you might find interesting, it was said: In the business world, this phenomenon, of the Comparing Mind doesn’t care about the size of a raise. It only cares if it’s bigger than their co-worker’s raise. For instance, when a CEO’s pay was made public in 1992, it triggered the Comparing Mind in thousands of executives across America. “Wait, she’s making what??” As a result, CEO pay spiraled upwards like a whirlybird.

The takeaway is that the Comparing Mind thinks in terms of relative or equivalent achievement, not in significant or absolute achievement. In other words, if we are not conscious of the other person, we don’t even make the comparison.

Model Jimmy Flint-Smith Photo by Juan Coronado

The point is when confronted with Comparing Mind, it is helpful to put things in perspective. The Comparing Mind is blind. It’s blind to the fact that “successful people” are just people. Beneath all their outward success, they’re as flawed as the rest of us.

Tim Ferriss, for example, author of the “4-hour Workweek”: in 2016 his The Tim Ferriss Show was considered the #1 business podcast on all of iTunes and was ranked #1 out of 300,000+ podcasts, so when you talk about social media success, his name is one that would come to mind.  

Interestingly enough, Tim Ferriss, is purported to have written a revealing blog a few years ago. In the article, Ferriss purportedly wrote that he often struggles to get out of bed in the morning and that he was seeing a therapist. Therefore successful superstar or not, we don’t always have it easy. None of us have it easy all the time.

But, one thing we can do to keep down the stress, is to become conscious of when the Comparing Mind is in action and to develop a sense of examined mindfulness about it.

And when you catch the Comparing Mind doing its thing, remember to flip your focus, stop and check, is your attention on the relative or the significant efforts to your achievement success? It doesn’t matter what other people are doing. It does matter what you are doing, and how you feel about doing it.

The Future - Man Vs Nature? or Man in Nature? Which is It

Is it Man vs Nature? or Man in Nature? Which is it going to be?
Looking for a new business venture? Try looking backwards to create a new business and/or lifestyle model for Man & Nature

 
We have observed that people looking for meaningful lives and purposeful careers go outside the Norm, to come up with new workable goals and to craft improved life and business models in which to work. New combinations of paradigms are thus created and enable life and work to move forward. The “Male On Man” blog is a tool to help refocus and identify such paradigm shifts found in Life, Culture, Science, and Employment offering you helpful points of view that are in the pipeline, that may put you ahead of the curve. 

Check Out an article by Joseph Dussault, staff writer for C.S. Monitor found at -  https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2017/1124/Is-culture-missing-from-conservation-Scientists-take-cues-from-indigenous-peoples?j=17932&sfmc_sub=13792255&l=666_HTM.

PATTERNS OF THOUGHT
We typically think of conservation as removing humans from the ecosystem to return it to its 'natural' state. But the practices of many indigenous cultures offer a different way to view humanity's relationship with the natural world.

Dussault offers us a viable way to shift our thinking when we consider new job creation or lifestyle changes. Dussault shows us where a shift in our thinking regarding concepts such as sustainability, conservation, man’s relationship to nature and culture can be reinvented. He offers notions of scientists who have gone back to investigate and take cues from indigenous peoples.  Follow the link above.  It’s a good read that can lead you to revisions on conclusions about life, conservation, and possible career choices for the future. 
 

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Outside the lines

“Outside the lines” by Calvin Harris

Last month while having coffee & croissants at a Long Beach, CA. dinner, with a few buddies, a discussion came up on finding ways to think beyond the boxes we find ourselves in, and the possible futures those changes could create.  It all started with Tom talking about the 2016 Hybrid and Electric Cars as an example of a change in our shared view of the box called Transportation. Roy pointed out, that this change was due to fuel cost for crude oil, especially in the summer, the cost of fuel goes up as vacationers take to the road and to the so called bi-annual fuel reformulation cost.

Then the conversation really took off with ideas on alternative fuel sources that moved into alternative ways to travel such as an affordable personal aircraft.  We ruminated over how long each of us thought it would take before an idea such as this would get from drawing board to prototype to market. Comments were made that some of these ideas must be in the works already and perhaps have been for decades.  That’s when Roy brought up the quote, and conversation moved around African-American writer and activist Dr. Amos Wilson who is credited with the quote “If you want to understand any problem in America, you need to focus on the profits from that problem, and not who suffers from the problem.”  Comments where all over the board about that quote when we were interrupted by the waiter’s commented to us, that whatever we were discussing must have been good for we were on our 4th cup of coffee, where as we are usually nursing only the one or two cups of the brew.

My thoughts kept returning to Jerry, and what he had said about an article by a new writer for the CSM, Ben Rosen (It’s funny how you can throw down a name or in this case a name of a newspaper - the “Christian Science Monitor” and all ears perk up, LOL, well it is a great paper), anyway Rosen had done this article on a research project at the Airbus facility in Munich, Germany where they are working with green algae slime, to turn it into biofuel that will at some point fuel their commercial airplanes.

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Tom pointed out “that If Companies are doing this, you know it has to do with cost, efficiency.” When Abe chimes in “Or in finding a better environmentally sustainable product than crude.” So as it turns out the Airbus biotechnological researchers have deduced Algae grows faster and produces higher energy yields than other plants. The downside right now is that it is much more expensive to turn into fuel than traditional petroleum byproducts. So we figured that your first flight using algae fuel could take a while. In fact, I was told that in an interview for Reuters International News Agency, that researcher and professor Thomas Brueck, at Munich Technical University, predicted that algal biofuel use could take as long as 35 years to become viable and pass jet fuel requirements. Professor Brueck is quoted as saying “…. We need a combination of different technologies to actually enable crude oil substitution.”

We deduced, in our coffee klatch conversation that new products could come sooner if enough incentives were there.  Of course, we concurred that it would take creative people with the agility and boldness of mind to seize the opportunities to create new inventions and technologies. Who could take ‎ inspiration or ideas from areas that are outside or beyond the boxes we confine ourselves to. Then Roy brought up the need and having in place those people with the understanding of the issues, that have both the agility and diplomacy for rectifying the new directions of technology with the old method of doing things.  We all agreed that people with these abilities need to be developed as drivers to change. It would take people developed with different education, perspective, and skill sets to brings about the transformation of transportation, aviation and shipping industries. Where science will meet art.  Jerry said “One thing that is in place that could move things along, is that there is some sort of regulatory mandate to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. Getting closer to that date, could bring many ideas off the drawing boards, to speed up the process of concept to market.  This will take individual’s, in various disciplines to come together committed to research and discovering sustainable solutions that move us forward.

The same could be said of our personal lives. Charles Darwin is reported as saying “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” I chose to call this Blog  Outside the lines, I think because it means to me that we all can become that agility, the agent to conceptualizing problems differently, approaching our life in new and innovative ways and understanding our position in relationship to any particular situation in new ways, perhaps taking action in ways you’d never thought of before. 

This would mean incorporating doing something in a different way than we are used to doing it. It is the need to invite randomness into our lives. Suggestions would be like asking a child for advice. Like working a project from conclusion to its beginning at least in your head. Reading or researching something in an unfamiliar field for the purpose of using it in another area. Drawing a picture or writing something with your left hand on paper.  It can be very revealing as I learned from a class I took from Artist-Instructor-Mentor Heather William of San Diego, CA.  I don’t know a better to say it than what I heard reported to be a quote from Dustin M. Wax, a writer, who wrote “– the talents you develop may come in handy the next time you face a situation “that ‘everybody knows’ how to solve.”  All I could say was WOW.  Try some of this and let me know what you think, who knows you could be the next new creator of the future.

Aloha

Calvin