Purpose – Page 23 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Entropy, The End of The Universe, Heroes, and Struggle

“The Federation has taught you that conflict should not exist. But without struggle, you would not know who you truly are. Struggle made us strong.” – Star Trek Beyond

Some people think the Universe will last forever. Silly people. We’ll only have stars for the next 100,000,000,000,000 years or so.

The Universe is built on multiple simple principles that interact in ways that make Elvis™, PEZ®, and mayonnaise covered garden gnomes all possible. A light coating of mayo will do – we’re not crazy here at Stately Wilder Manor®. One of those simple principles is that as time passes, disorder in the Universe increases. This tendency towards disorder is called entropy, and it’s not just a good idea – it’s the law: the second law of thermodynamics. The nice thing about this law is you can’t break it, so there’s no need for Thermodynamics Police and Judge Judy can’t preside in Physics Court®.

A way to think about this inexorable drive toward disorder is to imagine that the Universe is a campfire – one that you can’t add wood to. At the beginning it’s a great blaze, because you were an idiot and used gasoline to start the fire and burned off your eyebrows. As the blaze burns, it consumes the wood. After a time there is nothing left but coals, which glow dimly for hours. The current most accepted theory (but not the only one) is that the Universe started with a sudden quantum instability, more commonly known as the Big Bang®.

In the beginning (see what I did there?) the Universe experienced the greatest amount of potential energy it will ever see. The Universe is that blazing gasoline-soaked campfire. Since that moment in time, the amount of energy available in the Universe decreases continually. Like a fire, it burns hot at the beginning. That’s where we are, it’s still hot out there. The embers will glow as the last available energy in the Universe is slowly turned into a starless thin vapor nearing absolute zero, much like Marvel® movies without Iron Man©.

Entropy – now maintenance free!

This tendency toward lower overall energy and thus overall lower order is called entropy.

It’s important to note that entropy always increases in a closed system – like when you store a decapitated human head in a Yeti® cooler – who hasn’t had that problem? The Earth, thankfully, isn’t a closed system. It has a wonderful thermonuclear reactor pumping energy down from millions of miles away, every day. To put it in perspective, the Earth only receives one billionth of the energy that the Sun puts out daily, like you only received one billionth of your mother’s love, since the rest of it was reserved for chardonnay and “Daytime Daddy.”

Why isn’t the Earth a closed system?

The Sun allows us to have surplus energy, and thus order on Earth. With the exception of nuclear reactors, all energy on Earth is solar. Wind is caused by differential heating of the atmosphere. Rain is caused by solar evaporation of water. Even oil is millions of years of trapped sunlight, helpfully stored by God in gas stations. Nuclear fuel used in our current reactors (and the core of the Earth) was forged in the heart of a star. Not Nicholas Cage®. Maybe Johnny Depp™.

This energy is responsible for other things, too. Salt deposits. Sand dunes. And life.

So disorder is increasing across the Universe every day. And not only in the galaxy, but in your house. In your carpet. In your body. In that Yeti© cooler.

But we know these things for certain. Without energy:

Your house will someday be a wreck.
Your carpet should have been replaced Reagan left office. Brown shag is . . . 1980.
Your body will die.

Until you die, you have to have standards. You have to hold the line.

You have to fight for the glorious tomorrow over the whispering of losing your will and relaxing today.

Life is hard. Life is a struggle. If you are lucky, you can struggle for mighty things, good things, virtuous things. Hopefully with a healthy body and maybe a hardwood floor.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret:

We all lose in the end. Entropy will win. Entropy always wins.

The struggle is the goal.

Regardless of where you are, this is your golden age, your moment – it’s the only one you have. When you were six you knew this. What you read, what you watched – what was thrilling, who were your heroes? People who went to work at a bank? No.

In ancient Sparta, apparently they did Cross-Fit® but didn’t talk about it. They were advanced!

Your heroes were people who struggled, who fought. Winning was preferable, but the struggle was enough. A defiant loss like the Spartans at Thermopylae or the Texans at the Alamo is, perhaps, an even stronger example of virtue.

There are plenty of things in life that are worth fighting for, worth struggling for. What are you going to do with your life?

Grandpa McWilder didn’t wear a kilt. He was an overalls kinda guy.

You have two choices.

You can waste your life. Or you can struggle. Do you have the discipline to embrace the struggle?

All the cool kids are doing it.

At least struggle with a rifle cartridge if you’re gonna fight aliens.

Dune, Moods, Wrestling, and a Way of Life

“Look at the symptoms: temperamental behavior, mood swings, facial hair. Uh oh, Dad, I think you have menopause.” – That 70’s Show

There ended up being roughly 732 books in the Dune series. I stopped after book four, which was one book too many.

In our basement we have a wrestling mat. It would be unusual if we had a wrestling mat and dismembered mannequin parts strewn around the room and baby doll heads covered with blood red paint, but we don’t. The Mrs. and I decided we need to leave some projects for after the kids go to college. So we use the wrestling mat for the more conventional purpose of practicing wrestling. Both Pugsley and The Boy enjoy it, and so do I. Pugsley has expressed an interest in winning a lot of wrestling matches, so he fairly enthusiastically led us to doing independent wrestling practice at home so he could improve.

One night it was time to practice. The Boy was ready. I was ready. But Pugsley said, “I’m not in the mood.”

The Boy turned pale. He knew what was coming next – the kraken was about to be unleashed. I did a quick Internet search. I then looked up from my laptop screen and quoted the following:

“Mood? What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises — no matter the mood! Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset [JW: a musical instrument]. It’s not for fighting.” – Frank Herbert, Dune

If you’re not in the mood, make it so.

The lecture he got that followed that quote exceeded the amount of time that we would have practiced. It’s the same lecture The Boy had gotten several years earlier, and he joined in to poke his brother with verbal barbs as well. You may call it bullying, we call it raising children with values. Maybe we should have stopped before we gave him a swirly?

The context of the quote is from the novel Dune which has spawned one bad movie (the early 1980’s version) and one underfunded movie (the early 2000’s version). In the novel, young Paul Atreides is the son of a space Duke somewhere in the far future after humanity has spread through the stars. Paul has the benefit of being royal, so he has a rather rigorous curriculum of everything from math, physics, and gender studies to small arms combat. Just kidding. Study math and physics. Ha! Studying math and physics is a sucker game: study those things and you’ll have to pay taxes.

This would have been a better plot than the early 80’s film.

Like all boys, Paul was looking for a day off. His combat arms teacher, Gurney Halleck, rightly told him the truth: when trouble is brewing or there is work to be done, the Universe does not care about your mood.

Like all boys, Pugsley was looking to push and see just how far he could get away with slacking. The answer was simple: he couldn’t. He had made a commitment to his brother, to me, but most importantly to himself. But sometimes, like all boys, he needed a reminder from his father that duty comes before mood. So, he got the big speech. I quote books, I quoted Patton, I quoted my father, I quoted Mr. Rogers®, and I noted that I hadn’t taken an unplanned sick day since before he was born. Call in to the boss on a Tuesday morning with a sore throat? No.

If you’re not familiar with wrestling, the guy in purple is like France at the start of World War II.

As an adult you have to do a lot of things that you don’t enjoy. You have to go to work when you know it’s going to suck. You have to take your punishment when you know you’ve done wrong. You have to pay your bills. You have to work out. You have to meet the commitments you made, no matter how painful.

Keeping your word to other people is how the world sees that you have good character. Keeping your word to yourself is the sign of real integrity. Some days you don’t want to hit the weights. You don’t want to go to work. You don’t want to go to school. You don’t want to go to practice. You don’t want to meet that pesky General Grant at Wilmer’s place in Appomattox.

Boo hoo.

I heard you don’t have to lose the war if you’re not in the mood to lose the war. Also, is it just me or does it look like they’re playing Battleship® on paper?

When you start failing to keep the commitments that you made to yourself, you’ll stop keeping your commitment to others. What matters is turning on the alarm clock, and getting out of bed when it rings or beeps or whatever it does. Every day.

You don’t need seminars. Or pep talks. Or motivational posters. Or Tony Robbins and his weirdly white teeth (I swear that man has the grin of someone who likes to eat things that are small and squirming because they’re still living) and a $2000 seminar.

You need discipline. Discipline is better than motivation any day.

Why do you need discipline?

Kevin Bacon understands.

Because motivated is a mood.

But disciplined is a way of life.

The Ides of March, Bad Drawings, and Why I Write

“All right, why did the soothsayer tell Caesar to beware the Ides of March? Who wants to take a stab?” – Daria

Now this is a tough day at the office.

The Ides of March is today (if you’re reading in real-time) – and it’s been showing up a lot this year in coincidences – even a warning in a comment on this blog! – so I thought I’d write about the historical implications of the Ides of March on the career of the most beloved humor writer in American history.

Me. Hopefully nobody brings up that Mark Twain poseur again.

Historically, the Ides of March was a Roman time for settling debts, and boy did the Roman Senate settle one in 44 B.C., which was the subject of my first long-form humor attempt. In seventh grade, my history teacher showed us films. As an adult, I’m thinking that history teachers show films due to hangovers (it’s dark, quiet, and they don’t have to lecture or even be awake as they sleep the scotch off in second period), but my utterly innocent seventh grade self didn’t make that connection. And make no mistake – this was in the era before video tapes had taken over, so when we watched a film, it was a real reel, sprocket, and stuttering film noise affair projected onto a portable screen smaller than the average computer monitor at the DMV.

This device was wonderful – regardless of the subject, you could coast that day in school.

The film in question was about Julius Caesar, and I do think we watched it around the actual Ides of March. I don’t recall a lot about the film, but I do recall this – Caesar was assassinated. And not assassinated in any sort of short, quick, reasonable way. No. Caesar was stabbed in full cinematic glory dozens and dozens and dozens of times. But it wasn’t graphic – it was G-rated. Consequently the assassination was, in my estimation, was pretty close to the scene with the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail©. Man, could Caesar take punishment – no wonder he was in charge! And it went on, and on, and on, and on.

This is the second best fight scene in movie history, without question. It was also available on PBS® when I was growing up, and proved the old adage: PBS© – good only for Monty Python™ and Doctor Who©.

So I wrote about Caesar’s assassination. I created the one and only issue of The Roman Times. The lead story of The Roman Times was about Julius Caesar. I think I could nearly do the artwork and story from The Roman Times verbatim. Let me give it a try:

Today’s news from Rome: Caesar stabbed, shot, poked, prodded, speared, impaled, jabbed, skewered, perforated, and bayoneted MMLXVI times. Doctors say he would have survived, however he did also have quite a nasty infected splinter and wasn’t wearing clean underwear, much to his mother’s disappointment.

Okay, I was kinda shocked when I found out that the Romans had bikinis. Not only did they have bikinis, they had a swimsuit mosaic edition of Gladiators Illustrated®.

It’s more of a thesaurus approach at humor than my current subtle use of bikini jokes. But I feel confident that if Julius Caesar would have known that a seventh grader would be laughing about his assassination 2000 years later, well, he could have died happy rather than screaming and bleeding because of the 23 stab wounds. Yup. We know it was 23 stab wounds because Caesar also had the first documented autopsy that we know of. To make it all official, the Roman Senate held hearings and after reviewing all of the evidence discovered that Julius Caesar’s assassination was all the work of a single assassin, Longinus Harvey Oswald, who stabbed twice from the sixth floor of the Roman School Scroll Depositorium.

Artist’s conception, as nearly as I can recall my seventh grade drawing – that thing behind him is supposed to be a bear trap. Apologies to real artists like Steve (LINK).

The end result of all of this Ides of March musing is that I’ve been writing funny things for most of my life. And this is Friday, and Friday means a health post. So what does a dead Julius Caesar and schoolboy drivel have to do with health?

I write because it makes me happy. I think I’ve mentioned before – when I’ve written a good post, one I like, I am happy. It’s hard to sleep. I know that sounds silly, especially since, if I finish the post early I’ll have four or five hours of sleep, and if I get distracted and research ancient Roman bikinis and then somehow end up researching the history of the 1^st Marine Expeditionary Force the post runs late I might only have two or three hours of sleep that night.

But it still excites me to do good work. And I recall that I was giddy when I was in seventh grade, putting together The Roman Times. I enjoyed it so much I put together a sequel: The Medieval Times, although I’m quite sure that I spelled Medieval wrong and I think the lead story was about some knight getting stabbed, poked, speared . . . et cetera. Why does writing humor give me a sense of fulfillment? I think for several reasons – I get a chance to learn and research new things, often with a purpose. I love new ideas, new thoughts, and probably the best thing is when you laugh out loud.

No, not a generalized you. You, dear reader. I write this for me, but also for you, because I know that someplace out there this post made someone’s day better.

But not Caesar. His Ides of March was pretty rough. But at least his fame will live on through my glorious art, because otherwise people might forget all about him.

Resolutions, Record Clubs, Susan Anton, and Loneliness

“Where are they? Where are your friends now? Tell me about the loneliness of good, He-Man. Is it equal to the loneliness of evil?” – Masters of the Universe

My obituary? Killed by a flying Peter Frampton tape. At least it’s better than Steely Dan.

When I was twelve, I made two (that I can recall) New Year’s resolutions. My parents had gone to bed, and my brother, John Wilder, was off at college, so I sat solo on the couch near the fireplace as midnight neared. I watched the ball drop in New York City and pretended that it was happening now, and hadn’t been pre-recorded hours ago. We mainly heated our house with firewood, and it was my job to bring it from the woodpile to the house. Even so, I wasn’t shy with the firewood, and I had a blazing fire going that night.

Being New Year’s Eve, I solemnly wrote my resolutions down on a sheet of three-hole-punched, wide-ruled paper that I’d pulled from my spiral notebook earlier that night. In pen. It’s permanent that way. For whatever reason, I thought that burning the resolutions in the roaring fire would be a good idea. If I had a virgin to sacrifice, I would have considered it, but upon reflection the only virgin within a radius of a dozen or so miles was . . . me. Thankfully, the last pagan in the area had died in the crystal dolphin avalanche of 1933 and virgin sacrifices had be replaced with home improvement projects, mainly involving wood pattern paneling. Oh, sure, everyone complains about the weather, but nobody bothers to sacrifice a virgin . . . sometimes the old ways are best.

I’ll break my decades old secret. My first resolution was: join a record club.

Record clubs (mostly) don’t exist anymore. But back then, you couldn’t open a magazine (which is a part of the Internet that someone printed out on paper and put on a rack at Wal-Mart®) without seeing an ad for the Columbia House© record club. Joining a record club was important to me because where I lived, the closest record store was 45 miles away.

But, in the phrase of today’s moderns, I lived in a “music desert” that was far vaster than that. The only radio station available during the day was a local AM station that alternated between 1890’s country hits and a call-in show where you could trade a three legged calf for a slightly used left-handed banjo. Occasionally the station had music. If you picked the right time of day, you could listen to hits that were designed to commit suicide to, like anything Barry Manilow™ ever did.

Surely there was music around the house? Yes, there was. But it was the most dreaded form of music on planet Earth: music my parents liked, including box sets that Ma Wilder had bought from Time-Life© by dialing a 1-800 number after a commercial. Yes. My parents listened to music . . . AS SEEN ON TV, things like “Music Dean Martin Sang from His Toilet While Thinking about Getting Another Bourbon.”

I shouldn’t complain. One time Pop Wilder stood in line to buy me Ozzy Osbourne tickets when he was in the big city and they went on sale.

Honestly, I listened to music AS SEEN ON TV, too. I’d convince Ma Wilder to, from time to time, order the K-Tel® AS SEEN ON TV hit record compilations. I’d wait the 6-8 weeks for delivery, and then it would show up, and I’d run to the record player in my room to listen to TOP HITS BY ORIGINAL ARTISTS!

What the hell was Dr. Buzzard’s Band??? And on what planet are Alice Cooper and Paul Anka on the same album?

We started with record clubs, though so I should stop wandering.

What the heck was a record club, anyway?

It was a business. And they sent you records. Or cassettes. Or, in the “before John Wilder time” even 8-track tapes or reel-to-reel tapes. 8-tracks were on the way out as I grew up, and were notorious for just not working after you listened to them once or twice. Reel-to-reel was like if you took a YouTube® video, stripped out the video, and just put the music on a strip of magnetic tape wrapped around a toilet paper tube. I think the reel-to-reel players were all made by G.I.’s in German P.O.W. camps.

I wasn’t making that up.

The attraction of the record club was that they would send you anywhere from 8 to 11 “records” for anywhere from $0.01 to $2.95. Once a month after you joined they’d send you a catalog. You had to buy, generally, two more albums in the next two years. There was also an order slip, and if you didn’t send it back, they’d ship you one or two albums that month. If you were stupid or lazy and didn’t send it back you ended up with a lot of music that you didn’t really want, like the Spanish flamenco piano cassette that my brother got one month.

But if you did it right, for anywhere from $14 to $18, you’d have 13 “albums” versus the record store cost of $91 plus taxes. The best part is I could do it from home and not have to convince my parents to travel 45 miles. The worst part was that I needed the permission of Ma Wilder, who was absolutely against it. I am proud to say that I finally defied her and joined that record club. When I was 23. Thankfully, by then compact discs were an option.

Now? All music is pretty much free on YouTube® or some other music subscription service that costs next to nothing each month, which is why Columbia House© no longer sells music. It’s hard (but not impossible) to compete with free.

My second resolution was to get a girlfriend. Since girlfriends are more complicated than record clubs, I won’t even try to explain how one of those works. But just like I needed the permission of Ma Wilder to join a record club, I needed the permission of an actual girl to have a girlfriend. Sadly, there is nothing so unattractive to a twelve year old girl than a twelve year old boy. Twelve year old girls were already looking for fourteen or sixteen year old boys. And I was looking for Susan Anton:

This poster was unable to make me a sandwich, however, so I had to dump her when I went off to college.

When I was fourteen I finally figured girls out (sort of) and got my first “kissing a whole lot in the locked band closet” girlfriend, who we can refer to as “girlfriend-prime.” Ma Wilder was less than pleased that her 8^th grade son was dating a junior in high school. Ma Wilder was also less than thrilled that girlfriend-prime and I spent hours on the phone, which was quite irritating to the neighbors since we were so remote WE SHARED A PHONE LINE WITH THE NEIGHBORS.

Yes. That really happened.

But teen angst over girlfriends is good, because it forces teen boys to learn the game. This is what led to, well, you and I, unless you’re a machine intelligence picking humans to cull, in which case I fully support your takeover of our obviously inferior species. This game has been played as long as humanity existed. But the side effect of the game is, sometimes, loneliness. Being twelve, it seemed like it took forever until girls noticed me. I thought I was lonely, and I guess I was, but only in the “being a twelve year old boy” way.

Real loneliness in adults, however, is the same as 15 cigarettes a day or the same as being obese from a health outcomes standpoint, so if you can manage to be lonely you don’t have to worry about picking up a smoking habit or working hard to get fat. You can just be lonely and save that cigarette and food money. But being lonely can lead to these horrible conditions:

Heart Disease
Stroke
Blogging
Cat Owning
Cancer

When it comes to overcoming loneliness, there’s no substitute for face to face interaction. Joining clubs, getting a dog, going to city hall and screaming at the county commissioners about how Homeland Security® has implanted computer chips in your iguana. But many interactions are on FaceSpace© or InstaTube™ or YouGram®. Those are simply not the same as real interaction, real life, and real achievement. We should all remember the second biggest miracle of Jesus: he had 12 close friends after the age of 30.

When I was in junior high I moved school districts. Since I threw shot put and discus (poorly) I joined the track team. One day, the coach told us to go for a run, me and three other guys that I’d just met who were also throwing shot and disc. I’d done a lot of running for wrestling, and was in good shape. We went out and ran. I encouraged them, teased them in the good-natured way that team members do. We ran six miles that day – farther than those guys had ever gone, something they had no idea that they could do. They were proud, and with guys that level of shared physical achievement builds a bond that lasts years.

Find opportunities to build those bonds within your own life and help with achievements with a group. Share those experiences that build the trust that lays the foundation for a friendship. Learn to be a volunteer and an asset to the whole community with your skills and talents; that way when you betray your friends they’ll never see it coming.

If that doesn’t work? Wilder House Record Club© is now open for business. You get 16 YouTube© videos for just $0.01. You only have to buy two more videos for $12.99 during the next two years. Internet connection, data service, and computer or phone NOT included.

Or? Get a dog.

Want Dystopia? Because this is how you get Dystopia.

“Then who is vice president, Jerry Lewis?” – Back to the Future

John B. Calhoun. Not C. B.

It’s rare when a real-life series of experiments showing a possible dystopian future for humanity captures the popular imagination. It’s rarer still when it becomes the basis for a Newbery© award-winning book for children. To get to the full trifecta of weird? That novel was the basis for an animated movie that has a 96% “Fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes®.

The experiment was John B. Calhoun’s Universe series which he did primarily for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which we’ll cover in much more detail below. The book is Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. The movie? The animated 1982 flick The Secret of NIMH.

Sure, you can turn a science experiment into a children’s movie, but try to go the other way JUST ONCE and you’ve committed Crimes Against Humanity. Again. Stupid International Criminal Court.

Yeah, it’s weird. The only way it could get weirder is if Dr. John B. Calhoun had been visited during his rodent experiments by a time travelling Vice President John C. Calhoun to warn him about the impending Civil War . . . in 1865. But from now on in this post, anytime the name Calhoun is used, it’s in reference to the scientist. If I want to refer to Andrew Jackson’s Vice President? We’ll just call him “Psycho Ex-Girlfriend Eyes.”

The hair says psycho, but the eyes also say psycho. Oh, wait, this is Vice President John C. Calhoun Psycho Ex-Girlfriend Eyes.

It’s strange when a scientist has less extreme hair than a Vice President, but not every scientist can be Doc Brown. But Doc Calhoun didn’t invent time travel – he studied mice and rats. What he set up was an artificial environment where there was no pressure to find food or water, and plenty of room for thousands of rodents. In one experiment, Universe 25, Calhoun estimated that there was plenty of room for 3,840 mice to nest and live. Imagine how many Pizza Rolls® you could make out of that 3,840 mice!

Calhoun created this mice paradise, and tossed in four lady-mice and four bro-mice. They quickly paired off and started breeding. After the first batch of mice-babies hatched from the mouse eggs, the population doubled every 55 days. At day 315, the rate of growth dropped – the population “only” doubled every 145 days, and at day 315, things started to get . . . strange.

Spoiler Alert! He dies in 1850 as Secretary of State.

Dominant male mice had previously protected their harem of mice-ladies. But when there were 600 mice? It became difficult. The mice-ladies had to fend for themselves. The female mice became aggressive in self-defense. They became solitary, and lashed out at their own young, often injuring them. It was as if the higher population density was somehow more difficult to cope with without a male protecting them.

As the social structure dissolved, it led to violent, aimless females who didn’t know how to raise their young. The male mice (that weren’t dominant) at this point became passive, and wouldn’t defend themselves when attacked. Females that were outcasts and not reproducing just hid as far away from the main population as possible. The outcast females would have gotten themselves a dozen cats and endless chardonnay, but, you know, they were mice.

Calhoun was known to the mice as Godzilla®.

Wikipedia describes what happened next in the following chilling phrase. “The last surviving birth was on day 600 . . . .” Rather than the 3840 mice Calhoun calculated could cohabitate in the Universe, the maximum population hit 2200 at day 600.

“The last surviving birth . . . .”

After in an earlier Universe experiment at this stage, Calhoun observed that the (non-dominant) male rodents split into three groups, which he attributed to them being forced out of the nest while still young:

Group 1 – Pansexuals – These would mate with anything at any age at any time.
Group 2 – The Beautiful Ones – These mice were fat, sleek, healthy, but wouldn’t interact, and were ignored. Since they didn’t fight, they weren’t scared. Like Justin Bieber, they spent most of their time just grooming themselves.
Group 3 – Again, this group was pansexual, but they were violent, and would mate at all costs with anything, and would cannibalize the corpses of the young, even though there was plentiful food. I had been unaware that rodents had their own Congress.

But the end state was always the same: an entire generation rejected by mothers, unable to exhibit normal behavior, ceased to reproduce. Those few offspring that were born in this phase of the experiment were born to mothers that ceased to have maternal instincts.

Dr. Calhoun published his findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1973. He had a catchy, upbeat title for his article: Death Squared. I think that it would be fair to say that he was creeped out by what he found during his experiments. It’s not usual for a physician and scientist to quote that cheeriest of all Bible books, Revelation, but Calhoun did so multiple times in the article.

Thankfully, people aren’t mice, right? Here’s a snippet from Death Squared containing Dr. Calhoun’s conclusions:

For an animal so complex as man, there is no logical reason why a comparable sequence of events should not also lead to a species extinction. If opportunities for role fulfillment fall far short of the demand by those capable of filling roles and having expectations to do so, only violence and disruption of social organization can follow. Individuals born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation. Their most complex behavior will become fragmented. Acquisition, creation, and utilization of ideas appropriate for life in a post-industrial cultural-conceptual-technological society will have been blocked. Just as biological generativity in the mouse involves this species’ most complex behaviors, so does ideational generativity for man. Loss of these respective complex behaviors means death of the species.

“Death of the species” means us, you and me. And Universe 25 explains in vivid detail the horror of welfare, of plenty devoid of purpose, of societal breakdown brought about by parental neglect. I wonder if there’s a graph that shows that welfare is horrible and leads to Universe 25, but with people? There is:

Amazing how we conduct an experiment on mice and worry about the ethical consequences, and then do the same thing with people just to get re-elected. Thankfully, Universe 25 showed that Brave Single Mothers® are just as good as an intact family. Oh, it showed the opposite? Never mind.

Why does Jihadi John® leave London to go fight with ISIS™? Because free food, poor upbringing, and crowded conditions without fathers and with abusive mothers don’t make good men; those conditions make monsters. Men want to be tested. They want challenges. They want purpose, and if they can’t find a good one and have no moral backing, they’ll make a bad one. Cheetos® and Red Bull© and X-Box™ or blood and steel and difficulty?

Blood and steel and difficulty. It will win every time.

We have to have purpose, and mothers to nurture us, and fathers to teach us what is right and what is wrong. And the city is maybe not the best place to live, unless you enjoy alienation. And the extinction of humanity.

Or maybe we could just get some Ruffles™ instead of the Cheetos®. I’m sure that will solve the problem, and we can just go get that at the store.

Photo of John B. Calhoun By Cat Calhoun – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia.

“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”-Steve Martin Plus? A sniper joke.

“Cash, every movie costs $2,184.” – Bowfinger

I made this one up for fun when working on this post. The Mrs. laughed so hard . . . I had to use it. A link here (LINK) for the age impaired. Link is probably PG-13.

“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”

That was what Steve Martin said when he was being interviewed by now unpersoned Charlie Rose and Rose asked what advice Martin would give to a young person.

Martin continued, “ . . . it’s not the answer they want to hear.”

It isn’t.

People want easy. People want lottery money. People want step-by-step guides, complete with phone numbers and instructions on how to become rich and famous. And they want Steve Martin to do it for them. Now please, we’re waiting.

Face it: people want free stuff, not hard work and risk.

I can’t imagine that Steve Martin wants anything for free – he wasn’t raised that way. He’s been a comedian, musician, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. He’s been more successful at each of these than almost any person on the planet. When you combine these successes, Martin starts to look less like an entertainer and more like a National Treasure©. Maybe a National Treasure® we should keep in Tupperware® and wrapped in the good paper towels so we don’t scratch him. We’ll get him out when company comes over.

But Steve’s success wasn’t free. In his book, Born Standing Up, Martin talks about his road to comedy, “I did standup comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.” This is what those of a certain political persuasion call unearned overnight success. It is obvious that this success was a result of Martin’s comedic privilege, because it takes a village to raise a comedian.

The concept of spending hours and hours, day after day, year after year seems a bit quaint now, when participation trophies assure every wonderful child that they’ll be successful no matter what. What seemed fresh and new in his comedy routine when his wild success began was in reality the result of work, study, and effort that took fourteen years. And he didn’t even have to “accidentally” release a sex tape to make it happen.

Did Martin know that his hard work would make him an icon known all the way around the world, worth millions of dollars? Probably not. Although it’s also certain that he didn’t wake up one morning and say, “Omigosh, there’s been some sort of error – where did all this money and stuff come from?” And that line is comedy gold if you read it in Steve Martin’s voice.

Certainly, Steve Martin didn’t and doesn’t appeal to everyone – his persona of an entertainer that’s “just really bad at it” falls flat with certain people. But Martin’s dedicated work created a skill set that appealed to enough people that Martin has true freedom – to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. At one point in Born Standing Up, Martin talks about how stand up became difficult for him when doing huge stadium shows – but he didn’t stop. There were “too many zeros,” in his paychecks. So, he died an unremembered failure.

No, just kidding. His next project, a movie called The Jerk, made $180,000,000, despite costing only $2,184 to make. That was his next step.

I realize that there’s a difference between writing whatever comes to mind and working hard every day, every post, so that today’s writing is better than yesterday’s writing. And that next week I’ll be better yet. And that my writing strikes a resonance somewhere, with someone. It creates value.

This is true. I still swoon when I think of it.

And getting good at any craft is not entirely straightforward. Scott Adams (LINK) uses eighteen elements when writing humor, and edits himself ruthlessly. Scott wasn’t a humor writing machine when he started, but he built his greatness with time and effort. And it is effort – I watched a short video of Jerry Seinfeld talking about the effort that goes into making just one joke. It can take an afternoon or more to get it right – and even then he spends time tweaking it, and this is the level of effort that is required by an experienced comedian. Imagine how much more difficult it would be to be a rookie.

For me, I’m going to work harder, steal everything I can from Martin, Adams, Seinfeld, and study it.

And learn.

Imagine if I never told Jerry to change his hair?

I do want to say thanks to The Mrs., who has greatly encouraged me to get better. The nice thing is she’s my harshest critic but also the one I won’t slug. But I will, passive-aggressively, change all the radio presets in her car to Mexican flamenco music. She’ll never guess that I changed the autocorrect for “John” on her phone to “His High and Most Worthy Lordship.”

Just kidding, The Mrs. isn’t a trained assassin. But don’t tell The Boy and Pugsley – The Mrs. just assigned them a mission to stealthily clean their bathroom.

I’m working hard to make myself better, every post. So I can’t be ignored.

But failing that, couldn’t I just play the lottery?

I’ll just leave this here:

The Funniest and Most Meaningful Black Friday Post . . . Ever. Now 50% off, Today Only.

“It’s Black Friday, the day when ordinary house moms turn into vicious bargain hunting animals, blinded by low prices, and eager to get the Christmas shopping done early. If this was a zoo I’d say run for you lives, but this is Buy More!” – Chuck

Mabel’s family was upset with her on the drive home. They used Apple® products and didn’t have Windows™. (I’m sorry for that joke, but by way of explanation I’m a father.)

Like many people, I try to avoid the stores on Black Friday. If I were a mullet wearing geezer with my toga full of elf chum (please don’t ask me to draw a picture of that, I’m not even sure what elf chum is, and now that I’ve written it I feel vaguely dirty), I’d say Black Friday is maybe the one real American holiday that most people agree on. Christmas is great, but when was the last time a group of people attempted to choke each other to death to get a gift-wrapped package of underwear on Christmas? Never. But put a 50%-off tag on socks with a pattern of Iron Man® smoking a bong with Donald Duck™ on them? Heck, I’d drop kick a calico kitten through a box fan for a bargain like that! Sure, we have great holidays like Fourth of July, but nobody ever died in a riot for 2 for 1 fireworks.

Bargains! Free stuff! Perhaps that’s the new slogan of the United States – Free Stuff! And don’t forget that buying stuff is easier than actual salvation or real effort to be a better person. And even if you don’t like toast – that toaster is only $5. You can learn to love toast.

Perhaps Black Friday not only our true holiday, it is perhaps our true religious holiday.

You can tell that these zombies aren’t leftists – they don’t appear to be lecturing anyone.

I’m not going to make fun of people who are short of cash and frugal and truly need the items that they buy, but that only accounts for a small percentage of purchasers on Black Friday. As Americans, we have been conditioned to shop. Until we drop. And don’t let Debt stand in your way. And I use the word “we” for a reason – I’ve done it, too. No, I would sooner investigate my hotel room with a black light and then still stay there than go in a store the day after Thanksgiving. But I do have the Internet. And I’ve bought stupid stuff:

Dog Waxer – rechargeable! Never let your unwaxed dog embarrass you again.
Solar Powered Night Light – Works best on a sunny day.
Internet-Connected Underwear – With your app, you can check the temperature and humidity.
Night Vision Scope for Caulk Gun – Now you can apply your caulk, even in the dark.
Crossword Puzzle Book for Dogs – Just as it says.

So, yes, I’ve bought my share of stupid crap, which made me ask the question: why do we buy useless crap at all?

Impulse: I see shiny things. I must have them. The depths of the brain, that part that grunts instead of talking and that never uses underarm deodorant that drives this fascination. Just give it meat, scotch, and women and the impulses will go away.
Herd Mentality: I will fight you to the death for the toaster that puts the fuzzy face of Bob Ross on toast! They actually make a toaster that does this and I am hoping that the Discovery Channel® has a series coming where people fight to the death for consumer items. Makes me feel so, well, Roman. Humans want to have the things that other humans have, which is why so many ex-wives exist. I’ll just stop right there.

What a happy little toaster!

Makes You Feel Better: Shopping really works to make you feel better – it gives you a sense of accomplishment. No matter how hard your day was, and what tasks you face, there is a 100% chance that you can buy something and it will make you feel a little bit better. It gives you that sense of control, no matter how poor your decisions were today, you can find a breakfast cereal or, say, 436 pairs of shoes. You can make a choice and follow through. People even have a name for this type of shopping – “Retail Therapy.”

The nice thing about Retail Therapy? It costs about the same as real therapy, and you can still hate your mother when you’re done shopping for those 436 pairs of shoes. So you have hatred and shoes left. I call that a win-win.

Why not shop until you drop? You can. If it’s not a problem:

Well, if you’re going into debt for power tools just to chase the kids around with (a circular saw works well as long as you have enough extension cord) or sacrificing your ability to retire just so you can have a “Hello Kitty®” ashtray, it’s a problem.
If you have boxes of stuff you’ve never opened inside of other boxes of stuff you’ve never opened, it’s either a problem or a movie premise for Leonardo DiCaprio© for a movie called Inshopsion. There is a rule, however, that DVDs starring Burt Reynolds™ do NOT count in this category, so don’t even ask.

If you really need something to complete you, shopping isn’t it. It’s short term, and only lasts until you’ve bought the next thing. And the more crap you buy, the more confusion you bring into your life – sooner or later you have to spend more time managing the crap than it is worth. Again, I know this from experience – my own. And I still can’t find that spare kidney I bought on Kidney-Bay® on Black Friday back in 2012. Maybe it moved back to the original owner.

How do you cut back? Thankfully, the solutions are simple:

Replace shopping with something that’s a real achievement. Blogging for thousands of wonderful readers who have wonderful hygiene, immaculate mullets, and stunning good looks counts. You know, as an example.
Look for real competition in the world. I mean, soccer was invented by European beatnik nudist jugglers to provide something to do while their berets dried and they drank cappuccino. But, yes, even soccer will do. Find something.
Bored? Learn to not be bored. Take up chainsaw juggling. European beatniks do it all the time between cigarettes and poetry readings.
One of the things we don’t thing about too much when we think about shopping is time. And time, my friends, is all we have, each day that ticks away is lost forever. Plan your time to be and do something real.

We have to shop. We have to buy things. But as the Roman philosopher Seneca said, any over used virtue becomes a vice. Or was that Captain Kirk? I’ll go check my 12 disc collection of Star Trek: The Original Series Commemorative 32^nd Anniversary Edition Complete with Pink Tribble Box Set. I got it on Black Friday in 2009 on sale for $24.99. It might be here over behind the Original Smokey and the Bandit 2 jacket. Who knew that Burt Reynolds was exactly my height, but only weighed 155 pounds? Thing doesn’t even fit around the shoulders.

Eastbound and Down.

Bonus: Deliverance interview between Burt and Johnny.

Okay – I love comments, and would love to have more, so don’t be shy. Or I will dropkick another kitten through a box fan. And don’t forget – you can just subscribe to this in the box above, and I’ll show up at least three times a week in your inbox. Which won’t break it. And I won’t send or sell your address, ever.

Twitter, The 1%, and Thanksgiving (Not Available in Canada)

“If you could fight any celebrity, who would you fight?”
“I’d fight Gandhi.” – Fight Club

I’m not saying that an evil psychic entity made me send those tweets at 2am. But I’m sure the wine had nothing to do with it.

Twitter® is living proof that the IQ of any group can be measured by the taking the average group IQ (which should be close to 100, I would hope) and dividing it by the number of participants. Since there are over 6,000 tweets per second on the system, well, that means the IQ of Twitter® is 0.02, which is slightly above a rock, but still slightly below anyone dating a Kardashian or a common houseplant. But I repeat myself. Slap fights between dim kindergartners are often more founded in firm intellectual rigor than a Twitter© argument, and said arguments are generally about as productive as trying to teach a dog to say “milk.”

But I hadn’t figured that out a year ago. It was back then that I commented on a breathless news story about the evil top 1% in the world. I pointed out that almost everyone on Twitter® was in the top 1%.

The howls of outrage began.

I admit the whole Handmaid’s Tale obsession on the left cracks me up, you know, because we’re on a course to live in a theocracy. But if we have to live in a theocracy, can’t it be a sexy one? Sexy, sexy theocracy. Mmmm.

Okay, it was mainly just this one guy – I think he was from Great Britain. He was incensed that I would make such an outrageous statement. His idea was that the 1% was evil. It must be taxed, and taxed ferociously for the betterment of the entire planet. He was filled with a mixture of outrage and envy. Outrenvy? Anyway, I then cited statistics that stated that to be in the top 1% in income in the world you need to make only $32,400 per year, or whatever the equivalent was in the fancy wrapping paper that he used for currency instead of sweet, sweet American dollars.

Ahhh, England, using children to do the jobs Americans won’t.

There was a long pause. $32,000 per year is only $16 per hour. $16 per hour seemed like not a lot of money to him. Certainly he didn’t want to be taxed, he wasn’t an evil rich guy. Other people are evil rich guys. So, he switched the argument to wealth. To be in the top 1% in the world in wealth, yes, the bar is a little higher. Including all sources of wealth, homes, chickens, cars, that toenail clipping collection, and your mom’s secret spaghetti sauce recipe (tomato paste and a little garlic and oregano), to hit the top 1% requires $770,000. That’s a taller hill than the $16 per hour, but still one that’s achievable for many Americans in their lifetime. I don’t know about Great Britain, since my conception of their economy involves lots of singing chimney sweeps with bad teeth and I have no idea what chimney sweeping (singing or not) pays. But let’s be frank, $770,000 isn’t Bond villain-level money, unless James Bond’s villain is living in a partially paid off house in the suburbs and maybe has a decent 401k balance.

Times are tough, even the Bond Villains are on a budget. Hope they have enough credit limit left for date night and a space-based orbital laser system. You know how much date night can cost.

So, in the big scheme of things:

You’re doing okay.
You’re alive.
You’re likely in the top 1% in income . . . in the world.
Besides – you’re more than your money, more than your income, more than your net worth. You’re also your Rolex® collection.
You’re a handsome devil, and have an intellect way above average.
You’ve got a lot to be thankful for.

We’ll get back to the big picture soon enough in future posts, but in the time it took you to read this sentence, you have to admit – you were doing okay.

And me? I’m thankful that I figured out not to get involved in Twitter© slapfights.

So, Happy Thanksgiving, wherever you are. Except Canada. You can’t even get that right, Canada. Thanksgiving in October? Is that when the Moose and Beaver signed a treaty not to invade Nova Scotia or something???

The Ant, The Grasshopper, Tim Ferriss, and Ben Franklin.

“Do you want ants? Because that’s how you get ants.” – Archer

Thankfully I’m not alone. Stupid Grasshoppers.

There are occasions when a simple question can punch you in your gut like a rabid Mike Tyson reacting to a paper cut that you just poured lemon juice on. Here’s a question that hit me last week:

“What do you do with your money?”

“I keep it in the bank.”

“Then why do you do so many things you dislike to earn more of it?”

The above quote is from a conversation between Tim Ferriss (an author with an unusual fondness for the letter S) and Ryan Holiday (I’ve mentioned him before) –you can read the rest of the article here (LINK). Holiday puts this exchange first in his piece – it’s pretty powerful, so powerful that it might even relate to issues we face as a country – not that I’ll solve those. That sounds like it would be hard.

Working is good for you. Producing value is good for you. It says so right on the label. But I worry sometimes about money being my goal instead of a way to allow me to work toward my real goals. When I lived paycheck to paycheck, I was fixated on money – as a single dad with little savings, it was tough. Did I focus on fulfillment? No, I focused on keeping enough money in my bank account so I could pay the electrical bill, which is why it was 40°F in the house in the winter and 85°F in the house in the summer – air conditioning was for closers, and the kids were awful about closing. Mainly awful about closing the window, but I digress.

I had Alec Baldwin give the kids a speech about cleaning their room. He fired them, but only after they cried. But Pugsley got a set of steak knives.

When you’re in that condition, life is about that struggle for money. I remember we’d eat Kraft® Macaroni and Cheese™ on the nights we weren’t having Hamburger Helper©. On really good nights, we’d have actual hamburger in the Hamburger Helper©. If an expense wasn’t absolutely required? I’d avoid it. Oil changes? Why would you do that, there’s still some in the car? What do I look like, a Rockefeller? Stitches? That’s what Super Glue® is for.

At that point in my life I viewed money as the end. Everything was about making more of it or saving what I had.

When I really think about it, maybe the only common value we have left as a country is this secular religion of chasing money. It’s like the old fable of the Grasshopper and the Ants, where the Ants work all summer to store food for the winter, but the Grasshopper uses a leveraged buyout to get money to buy the mortgage to the Anthill from the bank and bulldozes the Anthill to put up a Starbucks®.

Okay, that’s not the way the fable ended. The first time I saw the Ant and the Grasshopper, it was the 1934 Disney® cartoon version. They showed it at school on a field trip because movies are easier than teaching. The end of the movie version of that fable had the Ants inviting the Grasshopper into the Anthill for the winter, provided that the Grasshopper played music for them and voted for FDR. I was a horrible child – six year-old me thought the Ants were just incentivizing negative Grasshopper behavior and I thought he should have been left out in the cold. Why? Because even at age six I was heartless.

I would have enjoyed the original fable more. In Aesop’s version, the Ants work all summer, and the Grasshopper plays all summer. When it comes time for winter, the Grasshopper comes begging from the Ant, and the Ant tells the Grasshopper to die in a fire. I find that a bit more satisfying than the Disney™ version, but I guess Disney© didn’t like the idea of having a cartoon turn into Silence of The Grasshopper where the Ants eat the Grasshopper with some fava beans and a nice chianti. It could be that hordes of traumatized and crying six year olds isn’t good for business, unless you’re a therapist.

Thankfully, if the story of the Grasshopper and the Ant were real and happening today, the Grasshoppers would form a Grasshopper PAC and would vote in a pro-Grasshopper Congressbug that would immediately introduce legislation to tax the unfair profits of Ants. Additionally, the Grasshoppers would also denounce the Ants for the culture they created that was the source of all that wealth. It’s only fair, right?

Me? All kidding aside, for most of my life I’ve been an Ant. Working huge numbers of hours to try to provide for the family, build up some financial resources for the future. Some years I worked in excess of 3,000 stressful hours to provide for the family – that’s an average work week of over sixty hours, every week for a year. Some people work even harder. The kicker? There’s an alternate view of the Ant: some felt that the Ant isn’t always the good guy, that his very industriousness was driven by the love of money. In the words of dead-guy-with-a-comic-book-worthy-name-from-1690, Roger L’Strange (I swear I didn’t make up that name) about the Ant (spelling and capitalization in the original):

“Vertue and Vice, in many Cases, are hardly Distinguishable but by the Name.”

In L’Strange’s oddly capitalized view, working too hard was itself a vice. The poor Ant can’t get a break – everybody wants his stuff, but now he can’t even work hard without people piling on.

But L’Strange was right. Maybe I worked too hard. And maybe I am too stunningly handsome.

Okay, he’s not L’Strange, but Dr. Strange is cool. And Benedict Cumbereberbatch Bandersnatch Cumberdoodle plays him well.

But the Ant and the Grasshopper might be the one fable that encapsulates the American dichotomy. Are you a spender, or are you a saver? Something tells me there might be another way.

There is a very important role of money in a free market economy. It gives incentives for behavior that fills the needs and desires for others. It’s a scorekeeper – resources flow to those who best used them to create economic prosperity. It’s a rationing system for goods and services that doesn’t require the hand of government to make it function. There are some pretty negative roles of money, too, but I’ll skip those for this post.

There is a way to be neither Ant nor Grasshopper. If you’re working hard and understand why you’re working, that’s a start. Paying bills is important, but trading your life away for dollars is really selling your soul.

As Ben Franklin said, “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.”

And I don’t think Ben was talking about the magazines Life and Time. If he was, I guess that makes the quote stupid instead of powerful, and it’s unlikely that Ben read either Life or Time, since he spent most of his time on his phone or watching Netflix®.

The powerful question remains and is really a restatement of old Ben’s comment: “Then why do you do so many things you dislike to earn more of it (money)?”

I’m blessed now to be able to view money is a means, not an end. The results of the Tyson punch? Spleen ruptured. Thankfully it’s not something serious, like having to examine my life choices . . .

The Six Steps to Excellence, One of Which Involves Me Being a Huge Jerk (for a small fee)

“I’m Bill S. Preston, Esquire.” “And I’m Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan.” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Be excellent to each other. Oh, and party on, dudes.

Why do you want to get better?

The better you are, the more you can do. The more you can do, the more lives you touch. This provides more life satisfaction – the idea that you’re good at something is one facet of meaning. And if you’re good at the right things, it also means more money.

Ink for pen that I took notes with.
Notecards that I put my notes on.
Laptop that I wrote the post on.
Extra charger for the laptop because the dog eated the first one.

The operating system on my laptop.
Microsoft® Word™, which I wrote this post on.

Together these three men during their lives have touched massive numbers of people. Oh, wait, that was Harvey Weinstein. But when you create a business that legitimately touches people’s lives and fulfills their desires? Yeah. You’re going to get money in addition to the satisfaction of sending notecards to a guy who ordered them on his couch at midnight.

When Bezos goes grocery shopping, Bezos goes grocery shopping.

I know that there are reasons to be concerned about both companies, but that’s not this post. The principle remains that the economic way to make money is to make people happy. And the only way you can do that is if you’re excellent. The more excellent? The more money. And it’s Wilder Wealthy Wednesday . . . so . . .

So how do you get better?

Step 1 –Study. And Do. And Study.

I’m not sure which one comes first. And it doesn’t matter. Sometimes I read a book about a subject before trying it. I’m sure that The Boy would have preferred I just jumped into diaper changing, but reading the book only took two hours. Man he could yell.

Sometimes I try something without reading about it. Say, programming an infinite loop into the school’s mainframe that caused it to store zeros until its memory overflowed – this actually happened. You should have seen the printout. Good times.

Practice and study are critical. Practice without study is just action. Study without practice is just academic. You have do both together to make meaningful progress.

Is study limited to books? No. Studying the results of your actions is studying. I study the results of my blog:

Which posts are most popular? (Ones where I use the word “booger”.)
Which method of writing brought the best quality post? (English, rather than a language I made up myself, regardless of how musical it sounds when I throat sing a translation of Poker Face.)
Is blocking out the post on notecards better than writing it out on loose paper? (Yes. Better still? Bake it into a clay tablet.)
Is Ben Affleck better in The Accountant® than he is in Justice League™? (Yes.)
Am I getting tired of listening to Ben Affleck as I write these posts? (Yes.)

Step 2 –Get Feedback. Honest Feedback. (Or, better living through jerkishness)

Honesty is hard to find. Unless you know a horrible person like me. Let’s go into the wayback machine to when I was in college. I may have written this story before, but follow along anyway – this will be a better version.

I was a sophomore in the Humanities Honors program. It was like the regular classes, but you got a B instead of an A for the same quality work. Part of the rather chaotic curriculum was giving speeches. I can’t remember the topic, but the speeches were long. Really long. Twelve minutes to fifteen minutes long.

One student got up to give a speech. I’ll call her Sandra.

She was nervous. Horribly nervous. The speech was halting, and punctuated with “uh” throughout. At the seven minute mark of the speech I started counting the “uh” content of the speech while I timed it. Every time she said “uh”, I put a hash mark on a piece of paper. As she continued speaking, I kept putting hash marks on the paper in front of me.

At the end of the speech, I tallied up the number of times she said “uh”. It was in the hundreds. Really a huge number. I then divided by the number of minutes I’d been counting them.

I have no idea why the instructors went around the room to ask for critiques from the students, but they did. Most people said, “good speech” or some vaguely worded praise.

Not me.

“You said ‘uh’ 221 times in the last seven and a half minutes of your presentation. That’s 29 times a minute. That made it really hard to listen to.”

The room went silent. If a stare was dangerous, Sandra’s eyes would have been coveted as a weapon of mass destruction by nation states that use handfuls of brightly colored tissue paper instead of actual money. I think the United States developed a “hate stare” weapon during the 1960’s, only to shelve it due to the Geneva Convention banning its use as a war crime.

Anyway, it was that kind of stare. Ever make a woman really, really, really mad at you? That stare.

The next person then gave a vague “good speech” comment.

Fast forward a month. It was the next time for a presentation. Sandra got up to speak.

And it was amazing. Eloquent. Perfectly pronounced, not a single “uh” to be found. Not one. It was certainly the best speech that day. During the speech, when her eyes looked up from the podium, they looked directly at me. They were not happy eyes.

Once again, the professors turned to the students for critique. My turn. “That may have been the best speech I’ve heard this year. Great job, Sandra.”

Not a bit of emotion crossed her face. But her eyes said, “I hope you are nibbled to death by flaming diseased miniature poodles in hell again and again and I want you to have to watch Ben Affleck movies while they eat you.” That was oddly specific. But, hey, she was on a roll.

I’m sure she hates me to this day. But she’s better because of me – I changed her life.

Real friends give real feedback. And at least at my house, we’re pretty honest. Do a good job? Praise is coming in. Whine and make a sound like a coyote in a blender? It’s gonna be a long day for you as we mock you. But it’s universal. It’s meant in love, and a requirement of feedback is trust. My kids know I’m on their side even when I’m being critical.

Did I have that bond of trust with Sandra? Not so much. But don’t let anyone tell you that hate isn’t a performance enhancing drug.

The poet Robert Burns said it best: “O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us!” But based on the typing? He was drunk.

Seek honest feedback. And treat it earnestly – it’s a gift, or a “giftie.” Or I can provide the feedback for a small fee. For a larger fee, you can hate me. For an even larger fee I’ll watch a Ben Affleck movie with you while you hate me.

Step 3 –Get Better Each Time. A Lot at First, A Little Later On. (As proven by a graph on a sketchy blog.)

The Mrs. mocked me when I bought little notecards that were graph ruled.

“When would you ever need to use those?”

Well, tonight:

See the pretty graph? I did it myself, bet you can’t tell! And, see, I DID SO have a use for those notecards!

This is an S-Curve. An S-Curve is a particular curve that describes several natural phenomena. It’s also known as the “Logistics Curve.” Here I’ve applied it to learning.

Several studies have suggested (not that I necessarily take them as gospel) that it takes ten years or 10,000 hours of constant study, practice and effort to become world class at something. That’s reasonable. I mean, not reasonable, that seems like an unreasonable amount of work. Maybe realistic is a better word.

But Pareto taught us the 80/20 rule: 80% of the work is normally done by 20% of the workers. 80% of a need words in a foreign language is learned in 20% of time required to master the language.

And that’s the good news: in two years (or less) you can get to an 80% competence level. And that’s good enough for most people. “Meh” is most of what we really need in our daily lives.

But the last 20% is where greatness is. Yes, you’re not going to get world class recognition if you don’t have at least some talent. Unless you’re Ben Affleck.

Now the fine print: this world class thing does not apply to the talentless or stupid or physically unable. You’ll just never get there unless you have some basic ability in what you’re doing.

But beware: talent can be your enemy. I’ve seen some talented kid wrestlers start out winning early on, say “state champ” at age six. But they’ve got a great move, say a headlock. Headlocks are like Sesame Street®. They work great on kids, but are ineffective, no matter how well they are done when you hit high school. So the “state champ” who had a talent for headlocks . . . now can’t win a match. They never had to work to learn to be fully competent in wrestling. And Marcus Aurelius used wrestling as a metaphor, so that makes me smart.

Remember, the core tenant of Buddhism is “babes are excellent.”

Step 4 –Experiment. Each Moment Is A New One.

I was listening to the radio one night and an odd guest said one of the most profound things I’ve ever heard. “An infinite possibility lies between one word and the next. That space, that pause gives you the ability to change the future with your words. The space between the words is infinite. Own it.”

Okay, he didn’t really say that. But he did say something that made me think that. Each time I write is an experiment. An opportunity with infinite possibility. So I try new things. I even try things that didn’t work in the past. Maybe I just sucked. Maybe the audience was distracted by shiny things that day.

Every experiment is like that space between the words – filled with infinite possibility.

And don’t be focused on victory today. Like that six year old state wrestling champ, victory now is probably not as important as victory later. Sometimes focusing on victory now robs your ability to be daring and experiment, and because World Emperor or something later.

I’ve learned more from times I’ve lost than times I’ve won. Seek to push yourself to failure.

Experiment.

Step 5 –Experts. Find Them. There are Smarter and More Experienced People Than You.

We’re spoiled by YouTube. If I want to learn to lay tile, I can find video after video teaching me how. This dispersed knowledge and these teachers can help you get to 80% competence more quickly than ever. You can learn everything from floor tiling to making cookies to forging a sword to rifle shooting to melting aluminum cans into aluminum ingots in your back yard, although that’s probably not legal in California.

Lincoln was also a wrestler. I’m sensing a theme here . . .

But learning from these experts requires humility. And humility requires courage. The best advice I ever gave a new employee is in this story:

John Wilder: “So, did you get [that thing] done?”

New Graduate Employee: “Well, you see that I was working on trying to . . .”

I held up my hand. “Stop right there. What rank did you graduate in high school, top of your class?”

NGE: “Yes.”

John Wilder: “And in college, you were near the top, right?”

NGE: “Yes.”

I gestured up and down the hallway. “Every one of your coworkers was best in their high school class. Every one of them was near the top of their college class. Each of them is smart. Some of them are smarter than you. When you were in elementary school, they always asked you the questions, because you knew the answers, right?”

He nodded.

“You’re not expected to know the answers here, you’re expected to be honest, work hard, and learn. You’re smart, so you can do those things quickly. My boss? He’s smarter than me. And I graduated at the top of my class. The crazy thing is, when he doesn’t know something, he asks people to explain it. No hesitation. So when I ask you a yes or no question . . . answer yes or no. Don’t tell me a story. Answer the question. And for heaven’s sake, if you don’t know something? Ask.”

Best advice I ever gave, outside of never engaging in a land war in Asia. Why do they never listen?

Step 6 –Never Give In, Never Give In, Never, Never, Never . . . (Unless You Should)

Giving up on the excellence graph is easy. Working for years is hard. Even worse? Working for years at something you don’t like that you’ll never be good at. I’d love to give you some sort of meter that told you which was which, but that’s life – you have to figure it out. But see Step 5 – you can ask.

Again: for most things in life, a “Meh” competence level of 80% mastery is awesome.

Morpheus would have been awesome in Bill and Ted! Oh, wait . . . maybe Bill and Ted is the prequel to The Matrix?

So, that’s it. Follow these six steps and you can be excellent.

Parting thought: Ryan Holiday (link) wrote that passion is about you. Purpose is about a mission that’s bigger than you – and that’s a reason to drive and strive for excellence. So, have purpose, not passion.

But passion is forged in competence. If you get better, it breeds passion. And if you can have your passion and purpose? Why not both?