Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! My wife and I received our second vaccination on Tuesday evening - we were so excited! I was pretty wiped out the next day - it took about 16 hours for it to hit, but then I spent about 8 hours with a low grade fever, but then the fever broke and by Wednesday I felt 100%. I’m now counting down the days till I can say I am fully vaccinated (8 days!).
This is the last full week of classes - hard to believe we are already heading into the final stretch. I’m excited because I have placed almost all of my students into internships for the summer. I wasn’t at this point last year until well into the fall, so it’s a huge relief. We have many new sites this year with really great developmental opportunities and preceptors who are looking forward to mentoring our students.
I’ve spent a lot of time this past week thinking about the Brian Tracy video I shared in last week’s RWL, “How to Set Goals: 80/20 Rule for Goal Setting”. The thing I keep circling back to is his comment that rich people have few goals and they work relentlessly to accomplish those goals. His counterpoint was that poor people have unfocused, dissipated goals and they don’t work on them very much. I don’t completely agree with Tracy because I do believe, as Machiavelli said, “I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less.” But Machiavelli believed fortune often rewarded the prepared, and punished the unprepared - in other words, you aren’t completely helpless. I find it frustrating how accepted it is in both popular culture and amongst my academic colleagues to assign virtually all success and failure to external influences, and to assign little of it to character and hard work. My parents were both from poor families, and I had the privilege of being along for the ride as they clawed their way up into the middle class by virtue of hard work and sacrifice. The lesson I learned along the way was that you make your own success. My parents had good luck and bad luck along the way, and they dealt with ethnic and class prejudices, but they always held on to their goal of “making it”, and they did.
I also don’t completely agree with Tracy’s characterization of the purpose of goal setting - it isn’t just about being rich. I’d substitute “successful” for rich, and then I would allow individuals to define what successful means. For me, financial success has always been more about independence than about being especially wealthy. The two are related, of course, but one can achieve independence through frugality and care combined with a reasonable income - one does not need to have a high six figure income to do that (or even a six figure income). As Thoreau wrote, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” I have worked hard, and had some luck, and with those winds to my back, I can say my wife and I have achieved a degree of Thoreau-style wealth. I retired from the Army at 45, and I have a comfortable job (that I really enjoy) with a modest paycheck. Between those two things, my wife and I can live a comfortable life with a high degree of freedom, which was what I always wanted. We’ve had mostly good fortune, but not all. Good fortune combined with discipline and focus, as Tracy points out, does yield success. Or, as Machiavelli would caveat, does tend to yield success.
I meditated quite a bit this week about the issue of discipline and focus as I thought about the Tracy video. With my broadened perspective of “success” rather than riches, I thought about whether I had focused goals that I worked relentlessly on, or if I lacked focus and my energy was being dissipated. I contemplated this fact this week as the yard around my house and the gardens were coming back to life. We bought our house from a landscape architect, and I can tell you, I have no gardening skill (or passion). I do like pretty flowers (image above is from our backyard), but the gardens around our house were created as an expression of the prior owner’s organic creativity. Since this is not a thing I care deeply about, it has been an ongoing struggle to maintain them. I feel an obligation to do so, but I talk pretty often about plowing them under and planting grass. I think one of the components of the insight Tracy was getting at is that we only have so much energy that we can focus. You have to have just a few goals because you won’t be able to accomplish more than a few. If you have too many goals (or no particular goals), your energy will also be unfocused and you will accomplish little. And here I will say again that your goals do not have to be only financial (though I think you cannot not have financial goals because finances are ultimately an enabler of other goals) - these goals can be around having a nice family, expressing yourself through art, or some other valuable thing. Whatever it is that matters most to you, you have to focus on and let the rest go. As Thoreau also said,
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.”
If you are going to accomplish anything, you have to simplify, to focus on the few things that really matter, and let the rest go.
OK! till next week - thanks for reading and enjoy the links!
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Read
What: The New Yorker, What’s the Trouble? How doctors think.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/01/29/whats-the-trouble
Why: This is an older (2007) piece, but I don’t think that matters much. Nominally this is about how doctors process information and how they can miss obvious diagnoses, but the cognitive biases that are discussed in this article are not limited to doctors in medical situations.
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What: Libertarianism.org, The Green Book
https://www.libertarianism.org/articles/green-book
Why: Have you seen the movie The Green Book? The one with Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali? I really enjoyed that movie. I feel like it has far more nuance than current discussions of race. If you haven’t seen it, you should. This article is about the Green Book that The Green Book was named after - The Negro Traveler’s Green Book. I had never heard of the Green Book until I watched the movie. This article gives some background history and context for the Green Book. It’s heartbreaking as an American to read these lines from the introduction (included in the article):
“There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment.”
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Watch
What: Bob Keiller | TEDxGlasgow, Doing Core Values (12 min)
Why: Really great discussion of why values matter, especially in an organizational setting. While Keiller is primarily talking about a corporate setting, you could really extend his ideas to a church, club, or even family. I was never put in a situation quite like the one he describes when his CEO threatened his career, but I’ve felt that kind of pressure, and it made me do some things I regret.
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Listen
What: People I (mostly) Admire, Sam Harris: “Spirituality Is a Loaded Term.”
https://omny.fm/shows/people-i-mostly-admire/sam-harris-spirituality-is-a-loaded-term
Why: I’ve been enjoying Steve Levitt’s podcast as you know if you are a regular RWL reader. I am vaguely aware of Sam Harris’s work, but can’t say I’ve read any of his longer work. The thing that struck me about the Harris interview is Harris’s view on meditation. His approach to meditation is non-spiritual. He refers to it at one point as “brain training” and compares it to attitudes about structured exercise in the 19th century. The idea of lifting weights, he says, was something done by strongmen in the circus, not by real people. Now it’s common knowledge that weight training is extremely valuable for health. So Harris argues meditation is like weight lifting for the brain. So much attention has been paid to meditation by Silicon Valley influencers that I have almost reached a negative attitude toward it - I hate following crowds - but this idea of brain training really appeals to me. If you have a meditation app or simple practice that works for you, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
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What: The President’s Inbox, The U.S. Withdrawal From Afghanistan, With Max Boot
https://thepresidentsinbox.podbean.com/e/the-us-withdrawal-from-afghanistan-with-max-boot/
Why: This interview is with Max Boot, CFR's Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow in national security studies. President Biden has declared we are going to leave Afghanistan by September 11, 2021. I have no idea why we would use that date as our final out - it seems like an extra, unnecessary concession to the enemy rather than a statement of strength. This is a thoughtful discussion of the challenges and likely effects of our decision to withdraw.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next Friday!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
'It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.' - Gandalf (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)