Tuesday, June 16, 2020

How to have a better life in 216 pages

Is this you? "Your alarm goes off. You slam the snooze button. 'If only I had more time to sleep,' you think. You feel a heaviness, but it's hard to pinpoint where it's coming from. Your head? Your heart? Your body. You can't decide, so you grab your phone and escape into social media and incoming emails. Your day hasn't started, and you're already behind. 

"At lunch, you catch up on the day's news, which only manages to make you feel even more depressed. By the end of the workday, your eight (or more) hours feel like a waste. You gravitate again to social media, browsing the photos other people are posting of their 'perfect' lives. By the time you stumble to bed, it's way later than you intended. . . ."

If that's you, then Redefining Possible: Proven Strategies to Break Belief Barriers and Create Your New Normal by Dustin Hillis and Ron Alford is the book for you.

Before we go any further, let me say as clearly as I can that Redefining Possible is filled with solid, practical, useful information and suggestion. Readers who (and this is the small print) actually embrace the advice and follows the authors' suggestions will accomplish more than they would otherwise and be more considerate husbands, fathers, employees, and managers.

Hillis is the CEO of Southwestern Family of Companies; Alford is vice president of recruiting for Southwestern Coaching. Southwestern, says Wikipedia, is a diversified, international, employee-owned family of companies. The original, a publishing company, was founded in 1855 in Nashville, TN; it now has fourteen companies in consulting, sales training, executive search, travel, tax services, and more.

Both Hillis and Alford had road-to-Damascus moments that led them to where they are now. Hillis during a high school wrestling match when "I snapped inside . . . I heard a voice in my head say, 'If you give up now, you're going to keep giving up for the rest of your life.'" He decided, "No!" pinned his rival, and had redefined the possible for himself.

Alford had his during a rough patch during his marriage when "an unexpected divorce had turned my entire world upside down." He realized, "I could stop whining and wallowing and accept the potential for growth in the pain . . . I finally realized that I had the power to choose which path I would take."

Their process can be reduced to three formulas: (1) Focus + Ownership = Vision; (2) Belief + Confidence = Faith; (3) Vision + Faith + Impact = Redefining Possible. 

You sharpen you focus by eliminating mental clutter, choosing your targets (write down goals and plans), guarding you momentum, and speaking your new reality aloud ("I am calm and focused in all that I do." "I'm present with every person I talk to.")

Ownership means "accepting personal responsibility for your actions—whether the results are negative or positive." It means not lying to yourself or others by rationalizing that "Everybody does it," "It's not my job," "I'm only human," "It's not important," or making an excuse.

Vision they say is "seeing a future that hasn't happened yet." With it, you are able to do everything with more energy, more motivation, and more excitement. Make a poster of what you want: a big house, foreign travel, expensive car, ocean-going sailboat . . . whatever will get you out of bed in the morning. 

Belief incorporates "the principles and values that are hardwired into who you are. You may have devout spiritual beliefs such as an unwavering belief in God or belief in a higher power, or you might believe in love, family, or helping those in need."

Confidence is "the authentic expression of having certainty and belief in what you are doing and how you are moving toward your goals." They do warn against—and define—false confidence and conditional confidence; they encourage unconditional confidence. I suspect it's tricky to always tell one from the other.

Faith is more than belief. It's "acting on an internal conviction. Trusting in the unknown and the unseen and being willing to step out and act even though you don't know what is going to happen."

To help readers understand and incorporate these elements into their lives, Hillis and Alford provide examples, brief illustrative case histories of remarkable successes, personal stories, and exercises. And if that's not enough, the book tells you how to reach one of the company's "life-changing coaches" to buy their services.

Although both authors have strong Christian beliefs, the techniques in Redefining Possible do not depend on a belief in a Christian God for their effect; it helps, but it's not required. They do believe in the power of verbal affirmations and power statements, the idea that if you tell yourself "I can do this," you will be able to do it. (It may also get you killed if you confuse it with false confidence.) 

I believe Hillis and Alford have found and codified a system that has worked for them, for the company's coaches, and for many, if not all, of their clients. If you feel the grind of life is wearing you down, try the book's techniques; it's an easy read. If that doesn't work, sign up for the coaching. If that doesn't work, maybe you're just one of those people who can't redefine what's possible.

Sunday, June 14, 2020

Kay Ryan's essays on poems, poets, and notebooks

Kay Ryan is a big deal. Seven books of poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship (2004), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2004), U.S. Poet Laureate twice (2008-2010), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2011), a MacArthur Fellowship (2011). For all of that and even given my casual interest in poetry, I'd never heard of her until a month ago. My loss.

Synthesizing Gravity
is a collection of Ryan's prose written over thirty years. It includes comments on poems and notes about poets including Philip Larkin, Robert Frost, Stevie Smith (a favorite), Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens (his letters), Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, and William Bronk all of whom—except Bronk—I had heard. (Note to self: Look up work by William Bronk.) Her observations about other poets and their poems are thought-provoking and apt.

Here she is, for example, on Williams: "The poems feel blown around. Some of my favorites have nearly been blown away. We sense this terrific freshness and immediacy when we read Williams; we hear this arrestingly authentic, direct voice."

And here she is on a Larkin's "We Met at the End of the Party": "the wonderful power of this Larkin poem comes clearly and simply from its being exactly what Larkin would write, from its issuing from a single self. It is his envy of those who can live forward, his chronic sense of missing out, and his enviable technique . . ."

In addition to the substantial material on poetry, Synthesizing Gravity includes essays on attending Ryan's first (and last) Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference and—worth the price of admission by itself—"Notes on the Danger of Notebooks."

Writers are often advised to maintain a notebook. If you overhear a snatch of interesting conversation, write it down. If a random idea strikes you, write it down. If you have an unusual experience, write it down. Do it because, as Ryan begins her essay, "Almost everything is supposed to get away from us." But while it may be easy press a few blossoms in your notebook to keep for future reference, it's hobbling. "For the truth is that memories are indistinguishable from matter in that they can neither be created (despite the claims of vacation brochures) nor destroyed." 

When you create a poem or a story, she argues, the memories necessary will be there. But taking notes, "the actual physical act of taking them, along with the resulting document in our own words, lends them a spurious importance. It becomes important to us to determine what we meant by that note because we wrote it. We are very self-conscious and therefore we must be vigilant about what we let ourselves see of ourselves. We can see too much."

She quotes Milan Kundera, "We can assiduously keep a diary and note every event. Rereading the entries one day, we will see that they cannot evoke a single concrete image." (Try it, you diary-keepers.) "If a poet seeks to make or keep memories," Ryan writes, "how will she ever know which ones contain the true power, which would assert themselves on their own?"

This essay affected me more strongly than Ryan's others because, while I do maintain a journal, I've never kept the kind of writer's notebook recommended to record snatches of thought, bits of dialogue. And—validating Ryan's point—when I write I use whatever's available already in my brain: dialogue, concrete images, connections, whatever. If it's not in my brain, I use Google. 

And I'm going to stop feeling guilty because I don't carry a notebook.

Saturday, June 6, 2020

"Prelude to Foundation": For dated science fiction

I'm afraid I have to admit that I've never read one of the classics of science fiction, Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (Foundation, 1951; Foundation and Empire, 1952; Second Foundation, 1952). Therefore when we were able to borrow Prelude to Foundation from the library without actually going inside the building, I read it.

Asimov published Prelude to Foundation in 1988, thirty-seven years after the first Foundation novel. As the flap copy says, "It is the year 12,020 C.E. and Emperor Cleon, First of the Name sits uneasily on the Imperial throne. Here on Trantor, the great multi-domed capital of the Galactic Empire, forty billion people have created a civilization of unimaginable technological and cultural complexity. It is a world so intricately woven that pulling one thread would unravel it all. Cleon I is unnerved by this . . . " When 32-year-old Outerworld mathematician Hari Seldon presents a paper on psychohistory, "little does Hari realize that he has sealed his fate and determined the destiny of humanity. For Hari Seldon possesses the prophetic power that is so desired by the Emperor. And now suddenly, this naïve and little-known Heliconian has become the most wanted man in the empire . . . ."

In some ways the book is a kind of Gulliver's Travels as Hari travels from area to area on Trantor, each with unique modes of dress, individual taboos, and concerns. He travels with a female historian who reveals almost superhuman skills as a knife fighter, and is rescued from one area after another by a character with the superhuman ability to show up when Hari needs help. Presumably Hari is assimilating the information he needs to perfect his formula for predicting the future, a future that I assume the later novels describe.

Asimov says there is unimaginable technological advances 10,000 years in the future, including cold fusion, faster-than-light space travel, books with paper on which the type advances automatically, a neuronic whip, and blasters that "mangled the organs inside the sergeant's chest" so that "without a change in expression, without a wince of pain, the sergeant crumbled and fell, dead beyond any doubt or hope." Trantor somehow is able to feed forty billion people with the entire land area covered by computer-controlled domes of various sizes and vast underground factories, stores, residences, and more. There is even the beginnings of anti-gravity, but it's expensive and limited.

Nevertheless, there's an old-fashioned feel to the technology. Trantor does have (primitive) computers, but there's no internet and no cell phone. Medicine does not seem to have advanced much, let along genetic engineering. When the character wants to buy a knife, she has to do so in an appliance store, and she recognizes the store for what it sells by a washing machine in the window. 

Even the description of the Galactic Empire sounds more like the Byzantine Empire than something 10,000 years in the future, although I'm willing to give Asimov a pass on this. I am willing to believe that, given humanity,  there are only a limited number of political arrangements possible, and people will not fundamentally change. There will always be anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise, and contempt. 

My biggest difficulty with Prelude to Foundation, which is a key to the entire novel, is the unquestioned assumption that humanity would give up an advanced technology without something better to replace it. That's not the way I understand science and technology works. We give up an early technology for a more advanced technology. We gave up 78-rpm records for LPs, LPs for compact disks, CDs for downloads. I am not aware of an example in the history of technology were a device was perfected and then abandoned except in cases where it was a component of another primitive technology that itself was outmoded. 

In Prelude, humanity had apparently perfected a technology and then gave it up and never produced more of the item. (I'm being coy here because I don't want to spoil the surprise for readers who have not read the book.) I simply don't believe it, and because I don't, the novel fails for me except as a kind of old-fashioned boy's adventure story. I plan to read Foundation, however, to see what exactly this was a prelude to.