Mortal Meds

Today is book club. Two recommendations draw from ancient wisdom to prescribe an RX for our daily lives, and the third is an alchemy of money, history, and psychology to reveal what never changes in a changing world. 

Medicine for our time. 

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Leading questions

In 2005, Gallup Research identified the “four needs of followers” in a study of 10,000 adults in the US. A second study in 2008 across 10 countries confirmed the same four needs.

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Old school

I was at the check out at Zupan’s, Portland’s treasured locally-owned grocery store when the young bagger asked If I wanted bags. I pointed  to the bags I had brought in that were laying in front of her. “Oh gosh”,  she said, embarrassed, "I'm at the end of my shift and I’m just fried”.  I told her I used to work in a grocery store and understood. I added that at the time, we  punched the prices into the cash register, shoppers paid in cash, and we calculated the change ourselves. The checker and bagger at the same time said, “no bar codes?” “Nope,”  I answered, “Everything was manual.” Again they said in unison, “no barcodes?” as though it were unimaginable.  

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Anchors aweigh

We all do it. Many times a day without even thinking about it. We see a problem and go straight to a solution. Sometimes the problem is obvious: I cut my finger and it’s bleeding. I need a bandage. Much of the time the problem isn’t that simple, and the solution we identify can become the problem.

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Stressed out for good

One of my favorite clients recently worried about the stress on his team as they began to dive into some really cool and creative initiatives they were all excited about. How in the world were they going to get them done on top of an already full workload? I said it sounded like eustress. “What stress?" he asked. Eustress. The good kind.

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Clean up that mess

Trust is a tricky thing. It can form instantly when we inexplicably click with someone we just met. It often builds slowly over time. It can be lost in a single moment never to be regained.

In my work, trust comes up more than any other word. We need trusty people in our lives. We want to be trusted. Our work is miserable when we don’t trust our organizations. And trust is the foundation of good relationships, which are the  most important thing in our lives.

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Growing some brain cells

Sunday Morning launched five years ago with this note:

Growing up, Sunday mornings were waffles, bacon, eggs scrambled in bacon grease, the Sunday Chronicle strewn all over the living room, Checkers (woof) and Patches (meow) in the middle of it all, and the 49ers and Giants games a constant. Sometimes this gave way to full-on pajama days.

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Because of a hot dog

To those of you who reached out and wondered what happened to Sunday Morning, I appreciate the nudge and encouragement to get back to it. 

So to start, here’s what happened. 

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Love actually

It was novel at the time. Research began at Harvard in pre-WWII, depression-era 1938 to figure out not what makes people sick or go off the rails, but instead, what helps us thrive. The Harvard Study of Human Development amassed gobs of data across two centuries that uncovered the single most important contributor to our health and happiness: good relationships. More than exercise, diet, work, genes, success, money, or anything else.

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Gradually, then suddenly

There’s a passage in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises in which a character named Mike is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he answers, “Gradually, then suddenly.”

That quote popped out of something I read a couple of months ago and it really made me think. And the more I thought, the more those three words explained so much. In such a simple and profound way.

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A funny thing happened on my way across the country

I felt like an excited kid anticipating my cross-country trip from Oakland, CA to my new home in Charlotte, NC. Route 66! Lake Havasu and Winslow, AZ, Albuquerque, Amarillo, Oklahoma City, then to Little Rock, Nashville, and the Smokies before landing in Charlotte. Changing landscapes, cityscapes, cultures, and National Parks to experience! It was a great adventure, and it left me hopeful that people with vastly different beliefs can have civil and open conversations about hard-to-talk-about topics.

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A great day =

Since the pandemic shifted many jobs to work-from-home (or anywhere) and the Great Resignation|Reshuffle|Renegotiation|Rethink further upended our work order, organizations have been madly surveying and throwing a lot of stuff at the wall to lure and keep the people they need to run their businesses.

There’s no question that our relationship to work has forever shifted, at least for those whose jobs don’t require a physical presence, and we’ll be wrestling and experimenting with this before we figure it out.

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How values built this

It didn’t start with a pitch deck or a business plan. In 2009 while walking in his San Fernando neighborhood, Rick Nahmais noticed citrus trees bursting with fruit that would mostly end up in the trash. Food lines were growing as the Great Recession ravaged people’s lives and livelihoods. The light bulb went on. The following three weekends, he and a few volunteers harvested over 800 lbs of oranges and tangerines from a friend’s yard and took them to a local food pantry.

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Lab class for life’s most useful skills

Groundhog Day again. Gallup released its State of the Workplace: 2022 report and one headline, Stressed, Sad, and Anxious: A Snapshot of the Workforce, summarizes what is a surprise to no one.

What is a bit different about it, though, is despite the myriad reasons for misery at work shouting at us from headlines daily, Gallup lays blame at the feet of managers.

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Two ears. One mouth.

The surest way to further cement someone to their convictions is to challenge them. Especially with those pesky, irrefutable facts. Yet we do this. We double down over and over again, and generate frustration for ourselves — dumbfounded wonderment at how someone could not see what we see so clearly — and strain relationships, or worse.

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The timeless values of Jeopardy!

In the midst of the post-election news blitz, a different kind of story got my attention. Burt Thankur, November 5th’s Jeopardy! Champion gave this emotional response when asked by Alex Trebek if there was anyone at home cheering him on: “Here’s a true story, man, … I learned English because of you. My grandfather, who raised me...I used to sit on his lap and watch you every day. So, it’s a pretty special moment for me, man. Thank you very much.” Did that ever bring a smile to my face as I thought about how that show had been a staple in our household as my kids grew up, everyone shouting out the answers. I think I hold the household worst record of right answers to the number of shouts.

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Money well spent

What am I supposed to do with all this money? That’s not a lottery winner asking. It’s what University of British Columbia psychology professor Elizabeth Dunn asked herself when she scored her first job. She scanned the research that revealed money often fails to buy happiness, yet she wondered if there was a way to spend money that could increase happiness. She teamed up with fellow psychology Ph.D. and HBS professor Michael Norton to look into it.

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The (mis)pursuit of happiness

When Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos became head of a residential college for first-year students, she was shocked by the level of stress, depression, loneliness, and anxiety the students were experiencing. That, and her own self-described “below average” happiness level inspired her to create a course packed with evidence from the happiness research landscape that debunks what we’ve been conditioned to believe will give us the good life, exposes the faulty wiring in our brains that conspires to lead us astray, reveals what does make us happy, and teaches habits we can form to get there.

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Talk gooder

Classes begin at Harvard Business School this week, and a course that’s sure to fill up fast this year is Associate Professor Alison Wood Brooks’ new offering How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life. It’s based on gobs of data revealing the importance of how we talk — not the proper use of language or presentation skills — how we converse each other in our daily lives. Students will learn conversation skills based on research insights through lots of practice, feedback, reflection, and wisdom from occasional guest “practitioners” such as matchmakers and comedians.

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How do you know?

“I just knew.” It’s that feeling you instantly got when you met “the one” or clicked with a friend. Or when you instinctively knew that dog or cat that stood out from the rest of the litter was the one coming home with you, or that house or town you stepped into and just felt at home in. We’ve all experienced this kind of knowing.

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