This video caught my eye simply because it looks like fun:
It might be even more fun if, after trying it once, it is possible to try it again and then again to rapidly learn from the experience. It might also be fun to let teams discuss what they learned between rounds, and then share information on what worked and what didn’t. The goal is not for it to be a competition, but to help people meet each other and cooperate with each other.
Today’s Reading comes from Chapter 1 of the book Authentic Happiness. This is a simple experiment for you to try yourself:
The students in one of my classes wondered if happiness comes from the exercise of kindness more readily than it comes from having fun. After a heated dispute, we each undertook an assignment for the next class: to engage in one pleasurable activity and one philanthropic activity, and write about both.
The results were life changing. The afterglow of the pleasurable activity (hanging out with friends, or watching a movie, or eating a hot fudge sundae) paled in comparison with the effects of the kind action. When our philanthropic acts were spontaneous and called upon personal strengths, the whole day went better. One junior told about her nephew phoning for help with his third-grade arithmetic. After an hour of tutoring him, she was astonished to discover that “for the rest of the day, I could listen better, I was mellower, and people liked me much more than usual.” The exercise of kindness is a gratification, in contrast to a pleasure. As a gratification, it calls on your strengths to rise to an occasion and meet the challenge. Kindness is not accompanied by a separable stream of positive emotion like joy; rather, it consists in total engagement and in the loss of self consciousness. Time stops. One of the business students volunteered that he had come to the University of Pennsylvania to learn how to make a lot of money in order to be happy, but that he was floored to find that he liked helping other people more than spending his money shopping.
Try not to become a man of success but a man of value.
– Albert Einstein
Today’s Reading comes from Chapter 5 of the book Authentic Happiness. It describes a way of assessing the state of your life and tracking your life’s trajectory over time. The book recommends doing it once a year, but it could be argued that it might be beneficial to do it once a quarter, or even once a month.
Weighing up your life
How you feel about your life at any moment is a slippery matter, and an accurate appraisal of your life’s trajectory is important in making decisions about your future. Irrelevant momentary feelings of sadness or happiness can strongly cloud your judgment of the overall quality of your life. A recent rejection in love will drag overall satisfaction way down, and a recent raise in pay will artificially inflate it.
Here’s what I do. Shortly after New Year’s Day, I find a quiet half an hour to fill out the “January retrospective.” I choose a time that is remote from any momentary hassles or uplifts, and I do it on my computer, where I have saved a copy for comparison purposes every year for the last decade. On a scale of 1 to 10 (abysmal to perfect), I write my satisfaction with my life in each of the domains of great value to me, and I write a couple of sentences that sum up each. The domains I value, which may differ from yours, are as follows:
- Love
- Profession
- Finances
- Play
- Friends
- Health
- Generativity
- Overall
I used one more category, “trajectory,” in which I scrutinize the year-to-year changes and their course across a decade.
I recommend this procedure to you. It pains you down, leaves little room for self-deception, and tells you when to act. To paraphrase Robertson Davies, “Weigh up your life once a year. If you find you are getting short weight, change your life. You will usually find the solution lies in your own hands.”
One interesting part of the exercise is deciding on which areas you want to use for the assessment. He has eight. You could choose any eight or ten areas that you like.
Give it a try this January.
If you want to be happy for an hour, take a nap;
if you want to be happy for a day, go fishing;
if you want to be happy for a week, take a vacation;
if you want to be happy for a month, get married;
if you want to be happy for a year, inherit a fortune;
if you want to be happy for the rest of your life, help other people.– Chinese Proverb
The following article examines an effective international aid effort that is operating in Haiti:
Cuban medics in Haiti put the world to shame
Ignoring the geopolitics, the embargoes, the endless debates around socialism vs. capitalism and so on, and focusing strictly on effectiveness, there is much to be learned from Cuba’s medical mission in Haiti. The article points out a number of important facts about the size, efficiency and innovative features of Cuba’s efforts:
1) Size: “A medical brigade of 1,200 Cubans is operating all over earthquake-torn and cholera-infected Haiti”
2) Consistency: “Cuban healthcare workers [350 of them] have been in Haiti since 1998”. “Most [other] countries were gone within two months [after the quake] again leaving the Cubans and Médecins Sans Frontières as the principal healthcare providers for the impoverished Caribbean island.”
3) Size: “Figures released last week show that Cuban medical personnel, working in 40 centres across Haiti, have treated more than 30,000 cholera patients since October.”
4) Innovation: “Since 1998, Cuba has trained 550 Haitian doctors for free at the Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina en Cuba (Elam), one of the country’s most radical medical ventures. Another 400 are currently being trained at the school, which offers free education – including free books and a little spending money – to anyone sufficiently qualified who cannot afford to study medicine in their own country.”
5) Consistency: “The Henry Reeve Brigade, rebuffed by the Americans after Hurricane Katrina, was the first team to arrive in Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake, and the last to leave six months later. ”
5) Innovation: “Wherever they are invited, Cubans implement their prevention-focused holistic model, visiting families at home, proactively monitoring maternal and child health. This has produced “stunning results” in parts of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, lowering infant and maternal mortality rates, reducing infectious diseases and leaving behind better trained local health workers, according to Professor Kirk’s research.”
6) Reality: “The hi-tech approach to health needed in London and Toronto is irrelevant for millions of people in the Third World who are living in poverty. It is easy to stand on the sidelines and criticise the quality, but if you were living somewhere with no doctors, then you’d be happy to get anyone.”
This video is also revealing.
There is much to be learned here. DecidingToBeBetter members hoping to provide medical help either locally or internationally can gain insight from Cuba’s high effectiveness on a very small budget.
Both of these images are trying to point out the problem of living a trivial life:
1) Why I need to delete Facebook
This short video is about the same kind of thing:
You look back after several years of trivial living and wonder what has been gained.
There are many ways to live a meaningful life – to give meaning to the 30,000 days you live on this planet. See The Meaning of Life for details.
If you looked at the Reddit home page on Christmas Eve, there were two links near the top that show a contrast in human beings. One was labeled with the headline, “17 year old boy drives to a stranger’s house every night to carry their son with cerebral palsy up the stairs to his bedroom because the parents can’t. ” It pointed to this article:
It is profoundly isolating to have a child as severely disabled as Sammy. It’s hard even for well-meaning friends to understand the immense strain of his all-consuming needs. Patty and Rick — who tried for 8 years to get pregnant before Ben and Sam were born — grieve for one son’s lost potential every day, even as they struggle to give the other as normal a life as possible.
“You plan for your child’s future, but it’s hard to do that for Sam,’’ Rick said. “You have this pathway he should have taken, and the pathway he did take, and you don’t want to look at either one.’’
And over it all hangs the certainty that Sammy’s condition will never improve — even as he gets bigger and heavier.
Into this world of love and hurt comes Rudy. Four nights a week, he leaves his homework and makes the 10-minute drive to the Parker house. Around 8 p.m., he carries Sammy upstairs, chats a bit, hugs everybody, and heads home to finish his work. After considerable effort, the Parkers convinced Rudy to take enough money to cover gas, with a little left over.
In the few months the Parkers have known him, Rudy has become not just a help with Sammy, but a salve for their pain. He and Rick talk about football. Patty quizzes him on girls. Ben usually parks himself as close to Rudy as possible, looking up at him adoringly. And most nights, Sam will tremble with excitement as Rudy picks him up.
“It’s like family,’’ said the shy senior. It goes both ways: The Parkers were on the field with Rudy’s mother the night Malden Catholic honored its senior football players.
Rudy, in a simple act of consistent kindness, helps out another family. It demonstrates the potential for goodness in all humans. See the meaning of life for a discussion about how acts of kindness and generosity can enrich your life.
Just below that on the Reddit home page was a contrasting entry entitled “Trolling the girlfriend”. Clicking on it led to this image posted by the author of the headline:
The most upvoted comment is this:
“Will you marry me?” Just kidding, Hey look, I don’t even know what you like because I don’t pay attention so I just got you a gift card”
Comparing Rudy and the troll, Rudy is spreading light, while the troll is doing the opposite. With your 30,000 days of life, which would you rather be doing?
DecidingToBeBetter saw “first light” in the world today, as MarshallBrain.com and several other sites linked to it for the first time. The site is in a pre-launch phase right now and your honest comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
See Seeking Comments on The Pre-Launch Version of DecidingToBeBetter for details on how you can help.
A really nice article in the N&O today about one man making a significant difference in many people’s lives – through real estate:
Bill Dumont buys rundown houses, refurbishes them and then rents them, in the process creating a safe neighborhood for the people living in Caraleigh:
Sixteen years ago, Bill Dumont drove through Caraleigh looking for a nest egg hiding behind sagging mill houses. He saw beer-drinkers on porches, tossing cans into the yard. He saw rotting roofs and plywood-covered windows. He saw worn-out people on worn-down streets.
But he also saw the shadow of a special neighborhood in those broken-down bungalows. Decades ago, Caraleigh was a place of blue-collar pride. Residents helped run the machines of the textile mill on Maywood Avenue, and everybody knew everybody else’s name. Dumont wanted that again.
So he bought a house. Then two. Then 10. Then 30.
One person made a big difference.
