The Human Kindness Project

February E-Newsletter Article #1

2010-02-12T14:46:00Z

140-11-01-2010
NOTE: this is article 140 which has been placed ahead of article 139. Upon reviewing 139, I liked the subject, and it will reappear, but I didn't like the tone. (Also, it was 16 pages double spaced.) It sounded like a rant and ... I don't think rants do much to promote human kindness. It is difficult sometimes, to see a problem and to write about it with clarity and without being ... hurtful or mean-spirited towards that problem and the people who created it: in this case, it was humanity. I need to step back and gain perspective before submitting that piece to you.

Two Sizes of Human Kindness Footprints
By W. Owen Thornton

Here’s a new idea for human kindness. I’m going to suggest that we leave two different sized foot prints from our lives: both must exist and neither can be avoided.

The first footprint I’m talking about represents the environmental or the ecological one or perhaps it is simply the footprint of “stuff.” The second is the footprint of people. What I mean by the first footprint – that of “stuff” – are things that cannot make us happy on their own. These are the things that may help lead us to happiness: career, owning things (toys – big screens, electronics, shoes) etc. What I mean by people is self evident.

Think of the two footprints of how we live our lives as this: when we die we will leave two distinct footprints in this world: the one that impacts the earth for good or ill (what kind of physical world will we leave behind) and the one that impacts people for good or ill (what kind of emotional, value-based, belief-based, ethical world will I have left behind). So, when I pass away, I hope I will have lived my life in such a way so that the footprint that is measured in “stuff” will be a small as possible and the one measured by the people left behind will be as large as possible.

The Footprint left from Stuff

The footprint from stuff will be (should be) small for many reasons. One, stuff alone does not make us happy. There’s no point in putting a big stamp upon the earth from this perspective. I’m beginning to realize that jealousy and greed … ogling, admiring and aspiring to have as much as the Joneses is what is principally wrong with our society. Stuff, by that I mean career and the things I own and buy and use and throw away, these things are not as important as people. Now, don’t get me wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t even lump career into this category, but seeing as I’m lumping the entire world into two categories: people and everything else, career has to go somewhere.

Career is important because it gives meaning for our lives and because it helps express who we are and what we desire to contribute to the world. But often career isn’t about the right things. Career should be important for the number of people that we can serve … the qualities that we can help bring to the world through our career choices that makes as many lives as possible better. But I don’t think that’s what we think about most when we think about career. We think about pay raises, and stress, and ladder climbing and passing the buck and going home early and pointing fingers and finding blame for screw-ups. And we worry about having enough to support ourselves and our families and having nice Christmases: even when we know that Christmases are not about stuff but about a different thing: spiritual and religious meaning. Okay. Admittedly, if I’m going to deal with career, I need to think some more about this entire footprint idea. But a beginning, I think, is suggesting that if we change our focus on career from what we do to who we serve, we place more emphasis into the people category.

Another reason the stuff footprint should be small is that the less stuff we have, the less damage we ourselves have contributed to the destruction of the environment. Say I’m a DVD collector. More DVDs means buying shelving units and making plastic DVD cases out of petroleum products, and using energy to watch them. These are the same DVD packages that many of us will watch once in our lives (sometimes we’ll never find time to watch them) and then they will become collectors of dust and they will end up in a dump somewhere. And it is these DVD cases that we work so hard for, so that we can posses them. And in the process of working hard we work long hours, past our kids’ bedtimes so that they don’t see us or hear us read stories or get important things from us, like learning lessons that people are always more important than stuff.

Now I picked DVDs here but it could have been anything. Why live in 2,000 square foot homes (or larger) with families of four when families of six in the 1950, lived in 1,000 square foot bungalows? We live in and use energy to heat 2,000 square foot homes because kids cannot go outside and play for at least two very good reasons. One they require 24/7 attention for fear that they will be harmed or kidnapped. Oh come one! You have to agree with me here, right? I’m 48. We played outside on our own until it was time for dinner. Today, if a kid could find enough green space to play in and should anything befall them, the first thing we would say is, “What were the parents doing? Where were they that the child could suffer any harm?” So kids stay home and the second reason we need large houses is because we don’t pay attention to people: rather we pay attention to stuff. We don’t play board games in the family room (admittedly a “stuff” item, but one that brings people together) after a family meal together. Rather everyone needs their own screen (computer or TV – and each day they get larger and draw more power to operate them) in their own private room so that they can entertain themselves individually in vast spaces of isolation. And the problem with how we’re living is that people are excluded and stuff is required to make this kind of life work. The footprints that we’re leaving behind are contrary to the size we should be leaving. Our “stuff” footprints are huge, and our people footprints are way too small.

People Footprints

When I die I want my ecological or my stuff footprint to be close to invisible. If people tried to find me from this perspective of life, I would want them to have to search VERY hard for my footprint. But when it comes to people … I want to impact as many people in as positive a manner as I possibly can. Should I die before the majority of my peers, I want to have the biggest funeral in the world. I want hundreds of people to cry because they don’t know what they are going to do without me.

Okay. That sounds perverse like I’m into hero worship or it may sound narcissistic but that’s not what I mean. I believe why we grieve is that we take the best parts of people up into us. Grieving then, is about letting those parts go. So, I want to be such a person of human kindness, a person who has been so kind to so many that there is a great deal of me inside a great many people such that they will know how much I impacted their own world for the better. I want to be that kind of person for so many people. I don’t wish them the harm of grieving my loss. What I’m really wishing for them is the betterment of their lives through me while I’m alive: and in the process of doing that, they will have taken a lot of me up into them … and upon my death, there will be a lot of me they will have to let go. I see this as a vast net gain for all of them, if I but practice the right kind of human kindness throughout my life.

I believe my acts of human kindness in this regard are to make meaningful connections with as many people I can. But I know that I cannot be all things to all people either. There are some people I will simply rub the wrong way. I won’t be their cup of tea. Let me give you an example of what I mean. I have met a number of erstwhile young people at university these past few years. Those who have taken special time to have lunch with me or debate questions from class, I have made a special point to reach out towards them in as meaningful a way as I can. I have invited them all to my home at least once for dinner. I have come to realize that my four years as a mature student are hugely precious to me and part of the reason why it has meant so much is because of the tremendous young people I have met along the way.

I know that these days are escaping me quickly. Soon, if all things work out I’ll be in graduate school and everything will be different. I won’t have opportunity to meaningfully connect with as many people as I once did. I won’t see these young people ever again as they graduate and move around the country, no, the world, seeking the lives and vocations they so richly deserve. And I miss those who have gone before, just as I cherish the ones I have connected with this year. So I have endeavoured to savour the moments I can with them, in a busy world where “stuff” footprints seem to consume so much of our time and where people footprints seem to take up so little of our time.

So, I ask you this. If life is like a walk in the snow and one footprint represents the stuff you leave behind and the other footprint represents the depth and number of relationships you have left behind, what will your foot-path look like? Will your path look like two even footprints? Will the footprint of stuff be large and the one representing people and your relationships be small? Human kindness, I think, dictates that one footprint looks exceedingly small (stuff-print), while the other looks like a massive creature has just passed through this world (people-print). Hey, it’s just something to consider!

January Newsletter Article #1

2010-01-27T15:14:00Z

138-12-11-2009

Human Kindness and the Hamster Wheel
Finding the Sweet Spot
By W. Owen Thornton

A recent car advertisement depicts a man racing on a giant hamster wheel. He runs on the wheel at home, at work and on the trips to and from work. I thought it was both tragic and funny. I thought it was tragic because being on a hamster wheel would seem to reflect something counter to human kindness: where I’m thinking to experience human kindness we would like to be free of that hamster wheel. Conversely if we’re in a rut we’re not dynamically charged about our lives. And I thought it was funny because someone so accurately depicted much of what life is like in an visual manner that was not cruel or mean-spirited. The cleverness of the ad is that the man only feels like he is out of the hamster wheel “rat”-race when he enters his new car. There, in his new car the man experiences the way life “should” be if we were living in a world full of human kindness.

The more I thought about what I was watching I began to wonder if the hamster wheel depiction was a good and real depiction of life that runs true with human kindness. Humans do well with repetition and routine, don’t we? It is understood that our work-week wake-up time should be kept throughout the weekend so that our sleep cycle remains constant and we remain healthy as a result. And without routine, sometimes we’d be lost. Think of the ISO-2000-and-whatever strategic plans that were created by the auto-industry and which raced through secondary and tertiary businesses as well as it being similarly incorporated in the service sector. Instead of acting upon instinct when it came to rework and mistakes, it was deemed advisable for businesses to create an action plan or a “hamster wheel routine” to ensure the same mistake wasn’t made twice.

Still there seems something wrong with a hamster wheel depiction of life, regardless of where that depiction occurs in our life: at home, to and from work or at work. When a hamster wheel is a true negative that suggests we’re running on the spot, or maybe, a better example is pacing back and forth. Pacing back and forth when equated to that hamster wheel creates a rut, in which we can become permanently stuck: we can entrench ourselves in places that are not meant for us. When this happens that hamster wheel analogy is a wake-up call that we are supposed to find some way of getting out of that rut. It is best to see it before it gets too deep, because the deeper they become, the harder they are to climb out of.

I’ve mentioned this idea before, but it is really nearly impossible to grasp. We need to both be on autopilot and fully engaged … at least semi regularly. What I mean is, it is okay to be on the wheel, as long as we step off periodically and check to ensure we’re on the right wheel. For example, say marriage has fallen into a routine. This can be a good thing when things are going well. Here we need to rinse lather and repeat. But from time to time, it is still great to have heart-to-hearts with our spouses to ensure we’re both on the right wheel at the same time, and that both wheels are pointed in roughly the same direction: IE saving money for a big vacation or in disciplining the kids, etc.

I think the real problem with hamster wheels today, and what makes them particularly dangerous to our overall human kindness is that we don’t have enough time to stop them and to get off and assess where we are. We lean on them for too long. We don’t see them in our mind’s eye often enough and suddenly we’re caught in places where we’ve been spinning in circles for far too long. Let me tell you a story about that at first doesn’t seem connected to hamster wheels. I’m 48 and I was born a half-generation out of sequence: my parents were a half generation older than most folk are when people have children. The thing is I remember things that are far older than I ought to because of the age of my parents and how they were raised. Because they were older, I only ever had one grandparent. I remember my grandmother well. The Sabbath was sacred to her. She wouldn’t even play rummy (a card game) with me on Sundays because that just wasn’t appropriate. SHE knew what it was like to step off her hamster wheels. In fact, she had created for herself a hamster wheel that compelled her to examine her other hamster wheels: she did nothing on Sundays. Now, zoom forwards 40 years. My wife recently read a book from a world-class theologian who suggests the loss of the Sabbath day of rest is a big detriment to our society. We’re on the go so much of the time, now, that we don’t even realize we’re on the hamster wheel, and even if we do, we believe we don’t have time to step off of it to make any kind of value-based assessment of our lives and to see if we’re on the right hamster wheel or wheels at all.

What I’m saying is that my Grandmother knew how to turn life off. I suppose you could say that once a week she stepped onto a pensive hamster wheel … a hamster wheel that forced her to contemplate about all the other wheels she might have been on at the time. She could step back from her life and give it a bird’s-eye view. We don’t have that in our lives any more do we? We just jump from wheel to wheel without thinking. It is this pattern where the danger of hamster wheels lie!

The busy-ness of our lives and the speed with which we lead them is seductive like the dark side of the Force, to use a Star Wars metaphor. We can be on those sick and twisted hamster wheels, the ones that make us perennially unhappy for years before we realize what is happening to us. And when we’re on these wheels, I think human kindness is one of the first things that go straight out the window. And we can justify that too, can’t we. “I don’t have time to do that special thing for someone else. I want to, but I don’t have the time.” A big thing to remember is if you have thought that a friend is on an unfortunate hamster wheel, then someone else has probably had that thought about you. It won’t necessarily be a one-to-one correlation, but it will be a thought in the form of a large circle. You believe A is on a wrong wheel while A believes B is on a wrong wheel, while B believes C is on a wrong wheel until Z is looking at you and thinking, She just needs a little shot of encouragement to make her life better. I wish I had the time to make that call and tell her …

To be fair I don’t know what the perfect hamster wheel kind of life looks like. Life is full of good routines. But there are also bad ones. There are sticks out there used to place in the spokes of those wheels that jam up our ill-advised hamster wheels. The problem with the stick is that we often fall flat when they are used. But, even so, when a stick is used we then have a chance to assess our lives from a bird’s-eye view. I’m not talking about the random, life-re-evaluation type of sticks like the following. Life sometimes places those sticks in our wheels whether we want them to or not. A distant acquaintance of ours lost his wife. He finds himself a widow with two young children to raise without a mother. That’s a big stick in the routine of all of that family’s hamster wheels. I would imagine, in his position, there is not a hamster wheel in his life that he is not considering right now. What should he continue to do? What wheels can he no longer get on (without his spouse to help him)? What new wheels should he start up?

The kind of stick in the wheel I’m thinking about is the self-imposed type: where we take time, slow down and force ourselves to get off a hamster wheel of our lives and really take a proper assessment as to whether or not we want to get back on, or whether we want to be on a totally different wheel altogether. An example of this is like someone who suddenly realizes they are overweight and they want to get off the wheel of overeating. Another one is doing the kind of work the way in which we continue to do it. Has life lost its zest? Hamster wheels are designed to give us zest, but with no self assessment they can also be a trap. Like any good thing, too much of it can lead to a life without the degree of human kindness we desire.

So we need to use our hamster wheels and carry a big stick … one that compels us … for the better … to get off our wheels and see if we’re really running the right race for us.

My prayer for you and your 2010 is this. May all your hamster wheels be ones made by you. May they all be happy hamster wheels. May you all be given a large, meaningful stick to stop your hamster wheels so you can stop your own hamster wheel (before the random wheel-stopping-stick of life does it for you) and with complete awareness you assess if you are in the right spot(s) for you. You will know you are in the sweet spot if you are in hamster wheels that have no guilt in their results … where there are no regrets. May you be on your wheel, or off it, assessing your predicament in the exact right proportions for you during this upcoming year. When you are in balance along these lines, you are in the sweet spot of life. And when you are in the sweet spot of life, look for ways that you can help others: places where you can practice human kindness. I’m thinking, to continue my analogy, that sticking sticks in hamster wheels only works when we do this for ourselves. So, to help others, you can give them sticks in order to help themselves … nudges of human kindness that lead your friends to help themselves to stop and assess their own hamster wheels. In fact, your willingness to practice human kindness towards others is an indicator of whether or not you are in the right series of hamster wheels for you because you have the right way of thinking in order to have time to reach out to our fellow travelers.

I realize that sometimes the sweet spot cannot always be maintained. Sometimes something or someone else comes along and stops us cold and we don’t even see them coming. But even in times like this if we are running our lives well, enforced stoppages of the wheel cannot stop us for long. We fall off, assess we were in the right place … and we get right back on. A hamster-wheel life can be good and human kindness can flow from us like water from a fountain.

God Bless and Happy New Year.

Owen

Fall 2009, #3

2009-11-30T15:26:00Z

Our lives are Leading us, Rather than Us Leading Our Lives

By W. Owen Thornton

A group of intelligent, middle-aged men with the capacity to make everything right – in this particular instance – failed to treat themselves and others with human kindness: they failed or rather will fail to do that which will solve their problem. The problem? They don’t have enough time to get together as often as they desire. “We’re all too busy,” one person said. Whether it was children, career, school or distance they were right … they were just too busy or too far apart to get together as often as they would like. They could feel old friendships breaking down, perhaps not this immediate group, but surely in the larger one … the part of the group not in attendance.

Now we’ve discussed before, in these pages, that the number one reason we are here, is for one another … and yet we fail our mission of ‘togetherness’ – which is a key component of human kindness (to self and others) regularly. It struck me that all of us were complaining about the same thing and that all of us had the same capacity to solve the problem and that none of us were about to go and change a blessed thing.

First let’s take a look at the immediate problem. Everyone was going to go back to their busy lives and none were going to make each other a priority. This is not a mean-spirited sentiment, but is based on research. We get caught up in the day-to-day conundrums of living life where our friends are out of sight for a few minutes and suddenly taking out the garbage takes on increasing importance. A study believed it would prove the following: that when it came to important tasks, we would do that which was most important in all cases.

	Most Urgent	Least Urgent
Most Important	1	2
Least Important	3	4

So a number one would be rushing a loved one to hospital in case of an emergency. A number two would be taking time to plan get-togethers with friends. A number three would be pulling the clothes in off the line before it rained (it will dry again … after the rain) and a number four would be, say, taking out the garbage. But the study found something altogether unexpected.

	Most Urgent	Least Urgent
Most Important	1	4
Least Important	2	3

We tend to do that which is most urgent rather than what is most important. Still, we rush our loved ones to hospital: we get that one right. But then we run out to get the clothes and hussle to walk the dog and … and … and … however long the list is to get done, we pick them off from the most to the least urgent. Surprisingly, then, you would think that we would make most important, least urgent number three, but we usually find resistance at this juncture. It’s the wrong time to call our friends when we think about it (it’s supper time and instead of writing it down to remind ourselves to do so later, we forget and three days go by before we think of it again … but then it’s after 10 and we still cannot call). And then, later we get together for something else and we say, “You know I’ve been meaning to call you for three weeks now …” So, we put off doing these things and we do the least important, least urgent thing and … we take out the garbage rather than calling our friends. Our lives are leading us, rather than us leading our lives.

Each day a chance to contact someone slips by is another day we’ve placed what should be a number four on our list of priorities ahead of our number two priority: that of contacting a friend. We’d rather take out the garbage than engage in an activity we all say we want to do: get together more often. And I am only slightly further along than my friends: I recognize the problem … and then I go and take out the garbage. It’s an improvement, but it still doesn’t get the job done. However, writing about it to point this fact out to you and reinforcing this notion inside of myself … at least that’s a gain!

What is the cause of all this human unkindness to self and others? I remember reading an introduction to an undergrad philosophy textbook that said philosophy and religion are two disciplines that seek to make the human condition a better one. Some might think that getting 90’s in philosophy exams is the key point in that scholastic discipline, but I say it’s not: I say it is the power to teach us to ‘think’. I believe we simply let the immediacy of life take us along a shallow flowing river of getting things done … doing busy “so-called urgent” things … rather than important things. We’re made that way. Our brains are a sieve leading us to lives on a slippery slope of our own discontent. We have the retention span of a gnat when it comes to remembering the important things in life over the many trips we will make to the garbage instead. That group of friends all said we’d like to get together more … that we’re all too busy … and we won’t do a damn thing to change our lives when we all have the power to make a difference.

Look at our society. We ogle the rich and famous. We all want to be Bill Gates or Warren Buffet in whatever skill or business we desire to excel at and what do we do? At night we sit in front of television sets … exhausted from jobs we don’t like and we think we are recharging ourselves by watching other people for four hours on average each day live their lives in “Unreality Television Shows”, sitcoms and cop dramas that have about as much chance of being like real police work as I have a chance of going to the moon and in the process we are failing to live our own lives. And when we fail to do that, we are unkind to ourselves and to others.

We are a people of stories. We all talk of how much we want to be together, yet we do nothing to achieve our goals. Either we want to get together and we’re misdirected or we really don’t give a damn about our friends we don’t see often enough and we just like to tell them stories about getting together. Stories have the ability to let us off the hook from our responsibilities.

A large part of the problem is our distinct lack of vision. We fail to see that a few minutes work towards our goals will take us down the road. When we see a goal the size of an elephant (real or imagined – for I do not think calling our friends is a big elephant) we tend to think we need huge blocks of time to strive towards it. Make no mistake, huge blocks of time spent heading towards a goal does make a significant impact. But the problem is we don’t often find those huge blocks of time. So we’re left with the bits and pieces of time that are left-over from our exhaustive days and we attempt to cram time towards a big goal. Just thinking of starting to head towards that goal takes more time than the little bits and pieces we leave for it. And so … we pass them by, doing something else that at least gives us some kind of feedback: we take out the garbage and now the kitchen doesn’t smell quite so bad. And we go to bed unrequited, unsatisfied for another day.

And another day becomes another and another until weeks and months and years go by and we wonder what we’ve done with our lives … where did that dream go to die: or in this case, we wonder why we NEVER see our friends anymore.

One thing philosophy IS good for is that it helps me to think: to be ON a little more than I used to be. I see things like this a little more clearly than I used to. And upon that I can bring to bear some of the things I have learned in my quest to become a better person and a better business person.

So, the solution as to how to do those big things that you cannot find time to do? Make them a priority. Some companies and individuals take the first half hour of every day and refuse to answer those ‘urgent’ phone calls. They work on the big projects a little bit, as a priority, at the beginning of each day. They have found that truly urgent phone calls aren’t often always that urgent … that the content of the message can be dealt with in 30 minutes. (True emergencies, like rushing people to the hospital are still done!) The problem with the phone, and now, even worse, with the internet email account is that it draws us away from our ‘power-thinking’ mode and it takes us 15 minutes, on average, to get back to the same level of thinking as we were in before the so-called ‘urgent’ interruption.

Remember too that a goal or a dream the size of an elephant is eaten one bite at a time. That means that a little bit of work towards the problem will get the job done. The fear that it is too big and that a single bite is meaningless is what holds us back from starting at all. Heroes, and in this subject we all have the ability to be heroes in accomplishing big goals, know that big goals are done in minor increments. They look big when you start, but one day, a big goal will be only a single bite away from completion. And when you are done, people will look at you as though you are magical and ask, “How on earth did you ever find time to do all that work. I am proud of you. I am amazed and astounded.” And they probably will not hear the answer that you took a little bit of priority time every day to work on that big dream. Big dreams are funny. In the future, they look massive. Once accomplished and you look back at them, they don’t seem that big at all. It’s this problem we must overcome.

Fall 2009

2009-11-23T14:56:00Z

136-07-15-2009

So. I recommend that we all stop watching reality television … that we pry ourselves away from this form or programming. What it’s doing to us is nasty to the point of being dangerous. Besides taking time watching others live their mean-spirited lives, means we have less time to lead our own lives. We’d be better off doing something positive to help us strive towards our own goals than learning from others how to lie, steal and cheat our way to the top.

FROM ESSAY 134-06-29-2009 by W. Owen Thornton

Why We Don’t Do The Positive Thing

By W. Owen Thornton

I realized that as I read this near-to-closing paragraph on my essay “A Call for the End of Reality Television Programs” where I talked about the fact that people make unconscious decisions based on the last material most recently taken up inside of us, that I specifically and that many people in general have a problem.

Many of us don’t know what is next for our own lives or if they do know they don’t know how to get there or lastly, they have tried what they know, have gotten stuck and are now lost souls. So they turn to reality television to live their lost lives vicariously … because their own lives are going nowhere. When we don’t know what we don’t know or when we are stuck along the way we’ll do anything rather than admit we’re lost.

And when we’re lost, I find that we lack the patience for human kindness … human kindness towards ourselves and if we cannot be kind to ourselves, then we certainly have too little energy to be kind towards others. When we are lost … when our goals are hanging out there … our lives in limbo … we drift with any wind that catches us … reality programming included. Mel Gibson, in “What Women Want” is trying to figure out what he should do about his love for Darcy. He’s blown it. He started out attempting to sabotage her and fell in love in the process. He is walking through his apartment, wondering what to do. Then, he looks in the fridge. “What am I doing? She’s not in there.” I thought the scene was clever. To me it is suggesting that we turn to eating something when we don’t know what to do, stuffing down our raw emotions rather than feeling them and doing something about them.

Man’s Search For Meaning

Before I launch into things that can be done in regards to our three potential problems: that we don’t know what to do for ourselves: that we do know what we want but we lack the knowledge about how to get there; or three we do know where we want to go, we’ve tried, failed a few times and are now unsure if they goal is real or whether life is telling you to give up: I want to talk about the importance of meaning for our lives.

Meaning in our lives is critical. Being somewhat of a lost soul in regards to career (I fit into category three) I have made a study of ‘life.’ One cannot do so effectively without stumbling across Victor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search For Meaning”. Frankl lived through the Nazi concentration camp experience and his key question was, why do some good people give up and die and why do others who seem less likely to, live … why did they survive the experience? It turns out that people who had something to go to, people who had a reason to live, something to do after the experience was going to be over: those are the folk who lived. It didn’t matter what kind of career was enjoyed by the individual. A doctor with what we might think had everything to live for might give up and die while a construction worker might still have to say good bye to his wife or attempt to create that dream experimental whatsis that he’d always wanted to build. It was those who had a meaning for their lives who lived and those who had no meaning for their lives who died.

Problems with Finding Meaning

There are many problems with finding meaning for our lives: Simply stumbling on our giftedness is difficult; Knowing that we deserve the rewards should the goal succeed is another; being too humble such that we cannot do the things required of us to achieve our goals and failing to acknowledge our giftedness are but four of them. I’d like to tackle these four scenarios before moving on because they act as barriers to our success … to our ability to be able to share human kindness.

Some fall into their giftedness and have the inner workings to run with it. I think these are the folk whom we admire … the folk who make headlines … the people who run mega-million dollar companies or after three weeks of being a waitress in Hollywood become a big star. We envy these folk and we may be jealous of them. But for the rest of us we’re gonna have to do some work in finding out what suits us and how to overcome the parts of us that we don’t have that allow us to fully access our goal or dream. Now there’s a cautionery note here. Those who succeed do pay their dues. Paying dues to the point of mega-success suggests that we require to work at our goals doing the things we want to do for 10,000 hours. This amount of time in a goal helps breed success. With this much practice, one it seems, cannot fail. So while we might envy and be jealous of the folk who fall into their goals easily, they must work at it in order to succeed. But lest we think paying our dues is a bad thing consider this: when successful people pay their dues they are doing something they love so much that it isn’t like work to them to place time and effort to the tune of 10,000 hours into their goals. The time just flies by!

So one key thing to note is this: your goal should be a natural part of you … if you’re doing it for free or for minimal results and the 10,000 hours fly by so fast it doesn’t even feel like work … then you know you’re on to something. Two good books to help you discover what you need to be doing for yourself are Wishcraft by Barbara Sher and The Artists’s Way by Julia Cameron.

What would hinder us from completing these 10,000 hours?

· A sense of entitlement: that we should be able to have the dream while short-circuiting the 10,000 hour model.

· Impatience. Disliking the 10,000 hours worth of work to the point that we bail somewhere before we finish. (Suggesting that you’re in the wrong place.)

· Lack of persistence. Thinking we ‘should’ have by now put in the time. I’ll call this the, “Are We There Yet” syndrome where we believe we should arrive on a cross country trip 10 minutes after starting out.

· Lack of vision. Where we get lost in the midst of the 10,000 hours and lose what our initial purpose was supposed to be.

Two Things to Know That Can Help Us Survive the 10,000 Hours

I’ve read some of the story about Bill Gates and his 10,000 hours. Some of the experience suggested that he fell into a position where he could work with computers at a time in the cycle of the computers where they might or could become big. He just worked at them so long, that things began happening while he was working on them. He started to write little programs that would help systems. I’ve never read that when he started that he wanted to become what he is today. He just invested himself in his goal, to perhaps obsessive levels – IE working on computers throughout the night because there were so few university computers that the only time a student could get on them was to work all night – with punch cards by the way! Bill just did what he loved and things grew out of that.

Secondly, the folk I’ve read about who were doing this kind of thing were often in a think-tank of sorts: they were working through their 10,000 hours with someone else they knew and liked. The Fab Four, the Beatles racked up their 10,000 hours at a German strip club/bar. But they had each other. The men who set the world on fire with the computer industry, such as Gates … well they didn’t work in isolation. Bill worked with a few others who were doing the same thing. So … it seems important to have someone doing something similar with you at the same time: a support group if you will. As I’ve always speculated at www.thehumankindnessproject.com life is better when we hold hands and walk together. But more importantly when the days are long and perhaps dark, it is good to have someone with you doing something very similar who you can talk to in order to pull you through the long stretch that makes up your 10,000 hours.

But there are bigger things that can hijack a dream or our Meaning!

When working through a skills list people are often asked for a list of their skills and weaknesses. Most people come up with a list of weaknesses as long as their arm while often leaving the skills list blank. There are a few easy things to say about this (though changing our attitudes around in regards to them will still be difficult). First an example of what I mean. A friend of mine attempted to gather together a list of skills of people so that they could learn what kinds of gifts they could offer the church. They wanted to get all 2,000 parishioners to fill out the skills form within two months: a lofty goal. Of the people who where hard to get to fill in the chart of their skills were those who didn’t think they had any skills to offer.

Some people genuinely feel this way. They are wrong, of course because everyone has gifts to give the world: for various reasons they just can’t see them. But whether people suffer from humbility – that they shouldn’t brag about their gifts; they genuinely suffer from such low self esteem to the extent that they do not feel they have any gifts or lastly that they downplay their gifts – that these gifts come so naturally that they assume everyone else has them too and they don’t feel that their own gifts are unique and special, doesn’t matter. Our perception is our reality. If you’re one of those who cannot fill out a skills section, start talking to people about this … and even that may be a tall order. Ask others what your skills are. They always know. They are the people jealous of your gifts. Keep talking this up to the point if you must, find a good counselor. What you need to know here is: you have gifts. Acknowledging them must come before you can use them!

Once you find the skills that lie within, the secondary problem: that of not being worthy of the rewards should you succeed, may well be taken care of as well. Our sense of self worth will limit our level of success. Somehow we must feel worthy of success. I believe that the reason why people who win lotteries and who spend themselves back down to the same financial level as they started within a year – a common trend – are limited by what they think their own worth might be. Having too much money in the bank is as stressful to us, when we don’t think we’re worthy of that money, as having too little money in the bank.

A bigger, vaster problem here is statistics which are difficult to overcome and which have enormous complications in regards to attempting to solve them. It is estimated that fully 25 percent of children grow up with someone in their family being addicted to either a substance (alcohol) or a process (work). In addition another 25 per cent grow up in homes where they are abused. Often these two groups overlap. Sadly we turn a blind eye to these statistics and we do nothing to change this. Anyone growing up in these homes will struggle with attaining a level of self esteem that enables them to even believe there may be a meaning for their lives. If you belong to either of these two groups or both, then success because you have the skills and you are worthy of the rewards will be far more difficult to achieve than had you grown up in a home without these two ‘conditions’. These victims struggle just to be okay each day. Too many people fight this fight. But, sadly as I do not have a solution here … other than great therapy for free by seeking out Emmaus International Support Services immediately.

Finding Meaning and Moving the Dream!

Finding meaning begins with being okay with yourself, acknowledging your gifts/skills and being worthy of future rewards. Once you have achieved this position (sometimes this is no easy task) you need to discover your own inner knowing about why you are here. Meditation may help. Get a book on this or find a guru. Reading Wishcraft can be freeing and liberating. Once you identify something where you might like to spend 10,000 hours doing something (and this will NOT be a daunting task, but will look like fun!) dive into the deep end of the pool (first ensuring that there’s water in the pool!).

But if you don’t know what you need to know … don’t know how to begin your dream … then you begin by being open to it. Advertisements for courses that could help you along the way will suddenly appear to you … people who know someone who know someone where you can glean advice and useful tips suddenly appear. Sometimes you do need to work this list. What is the rule? Five questions … five people will lead you to the answer you seek. “Do you know anyone with who has …” and sooner or later you will find the right person to talk to.

Never stop. Keep trying. If the person who is your keystone doesn’t answer right away, don’t give up. This is where reading Keith Ferrazzi’s book, Never Eat Alone comes in. He’ll tell you not to take unanswered calls and emails personally. If you are taking it personally you may desire to revisit those self esteem lessons you learned. Because unanswered calls and emails from people who don’t know you but … they know a friend of a friend of yours … well they go unanswered because people are busy, because emails go into junk folders, because they are on holidays because they are stretched for time, because they are bad administrators of their own time, because they don’t see the relevance of needing to talk to you ya-da, ya-da. Keep calling. Keep emailing. You will succeed. Not hearing back from someone is NOT about you. It is about them!

Don’t take no for an answer at this stage. You take no for an answer only when you’ve done everything you can with all of the knowledge you require and you discover, as Stephen Covey would say, that you’ve leaned your ladder against the wrong wall. This is the wrong dream for you. Start over. Things will go faster this time because you’ve done a lot of the steps required. Never give up. You will succeed. But at this stage, when you’re still investigating the process, well … you don’t know whether or not you are on the wrong wall. People owe it to themselves to do everything in their power to succeed at their goals and stopping before you have the information required to enable you to succeed, isn’t the way!

So far, what I’ve written helps someone who A: doesn’t know their dream, or B: knows what they want to try, but doesn’t know where to begin. But what about my position? Position C: knowing what you want, trying to get results and failing. What happens then? It may mean that you need to ‘try another way.’ Let’s say you do the right things but still fail. Well, here I’m talking about my novel writing and why my works aren’t published. I’m running up against a wall where my lack of skill hinders my ability to give me a fair chance. What I’ve done is tried a few times and gotten crushed and I don’t want to be crushed anymore. I’m learning … now … to have a tougher skin. That’s one thing! (And that comes from some great Emmaus therapy, I’ll tell you that!) Second I know that I didn’t try hard enough because the pain of rejection was too great. So I’m going to try some more. I can do that because I feel better about myself. I’ve learned that rejection of my work is not a rejection of me as a person! But third, I tried one way and it didn’t work. So I got better at that way and it still didn’t work. Then I tried the same way some more.

Insanity, they say, is doing things the same way and expecting different results. Recently I learned that someone I taught creative writing to has since published nearly a dozen books. So I’ve contacted her. I don’t know if she’ll contact me back. I’m not sure my method of contact will reach her. There are other ways to get to her though: IE sending a letter to one of her publishers!

But doing this does two things for me. It may well give me someone to talk to as I work along my 10,000 hours. That’s a good thing! Someone who’s been there can encourage and guide. I won’t be alone in doing this. If you’ll recall from above this was a key to success. Second, she may be someone who knows someone who knows someone who can help me get past my “try only one way” method. She might simply be able to hook me up to an agent or … a good editor or some solution like that! So that’s an additional possibility.

So Why Have I been Watching Summer Reruns?

I’ve been watching summer reruns and some reality programming (never a full episode of any one show – I just can’t do that because it’s not entertaining enough). I’m watching other people live their lives rather than living my own. Why? Partly because I didn’t know how to live my life after nine months of school. I was sort of shell-shocked from going from 70 hours a week to working on projects around the house. Don’t get me wrong, some form of a break was required, but after a while, I just found my brain turning to mush … then I found myself letting that happen.

But I believe that we all have the capacity to do something great … something wondrous … that we can all do something with our lives that will make an impact on this earth and even if I don’t find out what that gift is, I’m not going to go down without trying to do it because that’s living out human kindness for myself … and if I can be kind towards myself, then I can be kinder towards others.

And so I’m writing again … getting new ideas again … finishing old projects that had been lingering on and wondering about what I’m going to do with them once they’re edited.

School is part of my plan now too. Should I be able to go on to Graduate work, I would love to teach philosophy … help to shape young minds … help to divulge knowledge … to teach people to think for themselves and to lead by example by sharing the things that I believe in … the things that I believe make up a wonderful life.

In Conclusion

So why do people watch reality television? There may be little harm in taking a break from our own lives. But the problem comes when that break becomes watching it all the time! Suddenly people are not living their own lives: they’re watching others live theirs. How sad! Maybe watching others live their lives gives folk a normalization check. People see that others live as I live … so I’m not odd or weird like I might have thought I was. But when I continue to watch, well … I’m just wasting my time: stealing time away from myself and my own dreams. Maybe people watch reality television for the entertainment value: but I question that. I recently heard a celebrity say they are saddened by what passes for ‘entertainment’ lately. S/he was referring to reality television. In truth, I feel, according to my own sense of aesthetics at least, that there is no redeeming value in reality television.

Watching reality television is not a problem but a symptom of a lost people bent on finding a way to continue to stay lost. Watching reality television is an excuse for not succeeding. If we’re busy here, we don’t have to be busy working in our own lives (and confronting our demons that we may not be worthy of success or that we don’t know what the next step towards our goal might be.) Watching reality television programs is the same as going to the refrigerator door and looking for something to eat when we know we should be going to the home of the person we love and telling them that we love them (Gibson: What Women Want!). It’s a sidetrack and it’s an unhealthy one at that! Especially when we consider that we make decisions unconsciously based on the information recently taken up inside of us. Do you want to live your life making decisions based on the fact that you’ve watched so much negativity on a reality television program?

Real life is scary and frightening. It can get you hurt. But real life is about getting hurt and getting back up again. Sometimes getting hurt like that is a way of knowing that you’re still alive. In fact, if you want to go numb, watch some reality programming.

Professional speaker Jack Canfield says that the average millionaire of today went broke three times trying to become a millionaire! Success cannot be made without making a few mistakes along the way … without breaking a few eggs. Human Kindness towards ourselves means taking risks … getting out there and being alive. There are risks out there … risks for greatness … risks required for us to succeed. You’ve heard me talk about healthy risks before and maybe I’ll do that again soon. But I don’t think the risks I’m talking about are as scary as you and I think they really are. I’m betting that if you and I launch ourselves into the 10,000 hour program that you and I will take many risks during that time and you and I won’t even “see” some actions as being risky: they will just be part of the things you and I had to do to go to the next step.

Think of the riskiest thing you can. Now … go back 2,000 some-odd years. Become an itinerant preacher. Find 12 dudes to give up their work and families to follow you and now, for the next three years go preach a new way of being in relationship with God … ways that will get you into trouble. No one is saying that you need to end up like Jesus: that was his special gift to humankind: his blood so that people could find God through grace. Now I mention this, not because you need to be Christian. But it seems to me that Jesus lived out a life of high risk. His reward? His legacy has lived on for a full 2,000 years creating challenges and controversy for humankind ever since. Debate whether he was the Son of God all you will. Read his message and you will find incredible wisdom for leading a successful life including loving yourself. His messages and the lessons he taught: they are difficult to refute. And he did all that by one day deciding that he’d earn no money, but would go from town to town preaching The Way. How scary would that task be for one of us today? None could do it, I dare say. Not that way. Not to THAT degree. Yet he lived and was fed and had places to stay … most nights. But he wasn’t afraid of a cold night out on the desert floor every once in a while either. The greater the risk, the greater the rewards. Christ’s reward was a 2,000 year living history: and, of course, the saving of millions of souls who believed in his Way. Have many others so impacted the world for so long in such a positive way?

Maybe I should also talk about rewards, because I now don’t think they will all manifest themselves in a monetary way. Maybe too, we have to rewrite that script before we comprehend what it means to lead a rich and full life. Maybe there are many ways to win … but we have lost track of those too.

Blessings

Owen