To An Athlete Dying Young, a poem by A. E. Housman.

Post 418 - Alfred Edward Housman was born in Worcestershire, England. in 1859. After graduating from St. John's College, Oxford, with first class honors, he worked as a clerk in the Patent Office in London for ten years. During this time, he studied Greek and Roman classics, and as a result, in 1892 was appointed professor of Latin at University College, London. In 1911 he became professor of Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge, a post he held until his death. Housman only published two volumes of poetry during his lifetime: A Shropshire Lad in 1896, and Last Poems in 1922. A third volume, More Poems, was released posthumously by his brother, Laurence, in 1936, as was an edition of Housman's Complete Poems in 1939. Despite acclaim as a scholar and a poet in his lifetime, Housman lived as a recluse, rejecting honors and avoiding the public eye. He died in 1936 in Cambridge. He once observed, "I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word."

This poem may be familiar to many of you as it was read by Karen Blixen (played by Meryl Streep) at the burial of Denys Finch Hatton (played by Robert Redford) in the movie, Out Of Africa.

To An Athlete Dying Young by A. E. Housman.

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honors out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Post 417 - Summary of Dale Carnegie's classic book How to Win Friends and Influence People. If you haven't read it recently, I recommend you do so.

Part One: Fundamental Techniques in Handling People.

1: Don't criticize, condemn or complain.
2: Give honest and sincere appreciation.
3: Arouse "an eager want" in the other person.

Part Two: Six Ways to Make People Like You

1: Become genuinely interested in other people.
2: Smile.
3: Remember that a person's name is to them the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
4: Be a good listener. Encourage the other person to talk about themselves.
5: Talk about the other person's interests.
6: Make the other person feel important - and do it sincerely.

Part Three: How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking.

1: The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
2: Show respect for the other person's opinions. Never say, "You're wrong."
3: If you're wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
4: Begin in a friendly way.
5: Get the other person saying "yes, yes" immediately.
6: Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
7: Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.
8: Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view.
9: Be sympathetic with the other person's ideas and desires.
10: Appeal to their nobler motives.
11: Dramatize your ideas.
12: Throw down a challenge.

Part Four: Be a Leader - How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment.
1: Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
2: Call attention to people's mistakes indirectly.
3: Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.
4: Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
5: Let the other person save face.
6: Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be "hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise."
7: Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
8: Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
9: Make the other person happy about doing the things you suggest.

Harnessing the power of resilience.

Post 416 - Experience shows that successful people develop the capacity to manage adversity rather than being controlled by it. They've learned to let go of the negative, and find the talents, skills, and strength to function well, whatever their current situation. In their book The Resilient Self, Steven and Sybil Wolin studied psychological resilience and found that triumphing over adversity involved seven key elements - insight, independence, relationships, initiative, creativity, humor and morality. These are outlined below:

- Resilience requires insight. You need to develop the ability to ask tough questions of yourself and be honest with your answers. If you had something to do with your lack of success to date, be honest and responsible for it.

- Resilience is independent. As a resilient person, you can count on yourself to bounce back into life.

- Although resilience is independent, it’s also tied to others. The more people you’re responsible to, the greater your motivation to renew yourself. The stronger the reason, the stronger the action.

- Resilience calls for initiative. You need to develop the ability to take charge of the situation, to take charge of the problem. You need to stand up and do whatever is necessary to get back on course.

- Resilience has an element of creativity. With resilience, you're able to look at a situation and creatively determine the best way out. You're enterprising in your approach toward starting over.

- A resilient person has humor. You may cry until you start laughing, but a sense of humor is so important when turning your life around. You’ve got to take your goals seriously, and you’ve got to take yourself seriously. But you’ve also got to be able to laugh at yourself and your situation at times. If somebody says, “You’ll look back on this and laugh someday,” maybe today is the day to start.

- A resilient person has a strong sense of morality. Whatever you do to get back on your feet, whatever you do to bounce back into life, make sure it’s moral. Make sure that your upcoming success is not at the expense of others. Success, if it is yours to keep, must be at the service of others.

Consultant Ole Carlson, the author of Beneath The Armor, gives the following advice about how to lead a company so it's resilient enough to survive today’s ongoing challenges:

1. Make your personal resiliency unmistakably visible. If your employees see your resilience, they're more likely to pick themselves up after a failure and work towards success. If you moan and whine and stay face down on the mat, it's unlikely that the people who work with you will rise to the challenge.

2. Resilient people don't try to go it alone. If they do, they eventually unravel. Everyone needs a little support to get through difficult times. So work to create a strong support group around you.

3. Be willing to do something different. Part of being resilient is knowing where you messed up, then figuring out what to do differently. You have to be willing to try new things if you want to be successful. If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got.

4. Throw intelligent and appropriate resources at your obstacles. When faced with company-threatening adversity, there's no reason to hold back. If you do, you may blow any chance you have of overcoming the problems you face.

Fifteen rules to watch out for.

Post 415 - Here are fifteen little known but scientifically proven rules and principles that govern how we live:

1. The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.

2. The belief that enhanced understanding will necessarily stir a nation or a company to action is one of mankind's oldest illusions (currently known as Obama's law).

3. The solution to a problem changes the problem.

4. Each problem solved introduces a new unsolved problem.

5. Memos are written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.

6. Anybody can win - unless there happens to be a second entry.

7. If you have to ask, you're not entitled to know.

8. As soon as you mention something, if it's good, it goes away ... and if it's bad, it happens.

9. If a thing cannot be fitted into something smaller than itself, some idiot will do it.

10. The first ninety percent of the task takes ten percent of the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent.

11. Simple ideas are always worded in the most complicated way.

12. An executive will always return from lunch early if no on takes him.

13. People are always available for work in the past tense.

14. Nobody notices when things go right.

15. You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to float on his back then maybe you've got something.

Ten additional invariant laws of the universe.

Post 414 - Cleaning out my office files over the weekend, I came across some more invariant laws of the universe. In case you're interested, here they are:

1. You will receive a body.
You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period you're here this time around.

2. You will learn lessons.
You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called life. Each day in this school, you'll have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or you may think them irrelevant and stupid, but the lessons will continue.

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons.
Growth is a process of trial and error experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately "work."

4. A lesson is repeated until it is learned.
A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you've learned it. When you've learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.

5. Learning lessons never ends.
There is no part of life that doesn't contain its lessons. As long as you're alive, there are lessons to be learned.

6. "There" is no better than "here."
When your "there" has become a "here," you will simply find another "there" that will, again, look better than "here."

7. Others are your mirrors.
You can't hate or love something about another person unless it reflects to you something that you love or hate about yourself.

8. What you make of your life is up to you.
You have all the tools and resources you need; what you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.

9. The answers lie inside you.
The answers to life's questions are inside you. All you have to do is listen and trust.

10. You will forget all this from time to time.

Girl Writing a Letter, a poem by William Carpenter.

Post 413 - Born and raised in New England, William Carpenter earned his B.A. from Dartmouth and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He began publishing poetry in 1976, and won the Associated Writing Program’s Contemporary Poetry Award in 1980. In 1985 he received the Samuel French Morse Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. He moved to Maine in 1972 to help found the College of the Atlantic, a school dedicated to human ecology and the environment, where he remains a faculty member.

He remembers in the fifth grade, moving to a mill town in central Maine. “Most of the neighbors were taught by nuns in the parochial schools. I was the first protestant they'd ever seen, and they had to ask the mother superior if they could play with me. ‘You can,’ the nun told them, ‘but don't get too attached to him. He'll be going to hell.’"

Girl Writing a Letter by William Carpenter

A thief drives to the museum in his black van. The night
watchman says Sorry, closed, you have to come back tomorrow.
The thief sticks the point of his knife in the guard's ear.
I haven't got all evening, he says, I need some art.
Art is for pleasure, the guard says, not possession, you can't
something, and then the duct tape is going across his mouth.
Don't worry, the thief says, we're both on the same side.
He finds the Dutch Masters and goes right for a Vermeer:
"Girl Writing a Letter." The thief knows what he's doing.
He has a Ph.D. He slices the canvas on one edge from
the shelf holding the salad bowls right down to the
square of sunlight on the black and white checked floor.
The girl doesn't hear this, she's too absorbed in writing
her letter, she doesn't notice him until too late. He's
in the picture. He's already seated at the harpsichord.
He's playing the G Minor Sonata by Domenico Scarlatti,
which once made her heart beat till it passed the harpsichord
and raced ahead and waited for the music to catch up.
She's worked on this letter for three hundred and twenty years.
Now a man's here, and though he's dressed in some weird clothes,
he's playing the harpsichord for her, for her alone, there's no one
else alive in the museum. The man she was writing to is dead -
time to stop thinking about him - the artist who painted her is dead.
She should be dead herself, only she has an ear for music
and a heart that's running up the staircase of the Gardner Museum
with a man she's only known for a few minutes, but it's
true, it feels like her whole life. So when the thief
hands her the knife and says you slice the paintings out
of their frames, you roll them up, she does it; when he says
you put another strip of duct tape over the guard's mouth
so he'll stop talking about aesthetics, she tapes him, and when
the thief puts her behind the wheel and says, drive, baby,
the night is ours, it is the Girl Writing a Letter who steers
the black van on to the westbound ramp for Storrow Drive
and then to the Mass Pike, it's the Girl Writing a Letter who
drives eighty miles an hour headed west into a country
that's not even discovered yet, with a known criminal, a van
full of old masters and nowhere to go but down, but for the
Girl Writing a Letter these things don't matter, she's got a beer
in her free hand, she's on the road, she's real and she's in love.


By the way, can anyone tell me the year that William Carpenter was born?

Some final thoughts on character.

Post 412 - "In great affairs, men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small things they show themselves as they are." - Nicholas Chamfort

Michael Josephson’s book, Making Ethical Decisions, lists the six pillars of character as: Trustworthiness, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, Caring, and Citizenship. Today, we’ll review the last three.

4. Fairness.

Fairness is probably the subject of more legitimate debate and interpretation than any of the other ethical values listed here. It involves issues of equality, impartiality, proportionality, openness and due process. For example, it’s unfair to handle similar matters in an inconsistent way. And it’s unfair to impose a punishment that doesn’t fit the offense. Essentially, fairness means adhering to a balanced standard of justice without considering our own feelings and inclinations.

- Process

A fair person uses open and impartial processes to gather and evaluate the information he needs to make a decision. He doesn’t wait for the truth to come to him; rather, he looks for relevant information and evaluates conflicting perspectives before making an important judgment.

- Impartiality

A fair person strives to make decisions without favoritism or prejudice.

- Equity

A fair person corrects his mistakes, quickly and voluntarily. He knows it’s wrong to take advantage of the weakness or ignorance of others.

5. Caring.

Ethics is ultimately about good relations with other people and caring is at the heart of ethical decision-making. People who lack a caring attitude rarely feel an obligation to be honest, loyal, fair or respectful in their relationships except when it’s prudent for them to do so. When we really care, we feel an emotional response to both the pain and the pleasure of others.

Sometimes we hurt those we really care about when our decisions cause them pain. In these instances, we shouldn’t cause any more harm than is absolutely necessary while carrying out our duties.

6. Citizenship.

Citizenship includes virtues and duties determining how we should behave as part of a community. The good citizen knows and obeys the laws, but that isn’t all. He also stays informed on the issues of the day so he can better fulfill his responsibilities as a member of a self-governing democratic society. He volunteers and does more than his "fair" share to make the society work, both now and in the future. The good citizen gives more than he takes. He believes, as did Dwight D. Eisenhower, that "There’s nothing wrong with America that the faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure."

Being of exemplary character is easier to write about than to put into practice. Yet, people like my late friend, Armon Kamesar, seemed to live a life that was true to most of these virtues most of the time. As such, his example gives the rest of us hope and energy to try to do better. As John Quincy Adams said, "If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader."

In all human affairs, there are efforts and there are results, and the strength of the effort is the measure of the result.