Leadership, bravery, empathy, intuition

Seth Godin is thinking about the transition to leadership.

The flawed theory is that A+ students become good leaders.

There’s no reason to think that this should be true.

Doing well on tests, paying attention to what’s being asked, being diligent in short-term error correction–these are three hallmarks of someone who is good at school.

None of these are important once you’re charged with charting a new path, with figuring out what to do next. In fact, they get in the way.

We invented the educational regime to produce compliant factory workers. But the most compliant aren’t always suited to be the bravest, the most empathic, or the most intuitive.

Do you practice empathy?

What is empathy? Elizabeth Segal tells us in aeon,

Empathy is not imagining how you might feel in the place of another. It is imagining and trying to understand what the other person feels. The difference between thinking about yourself in another’s situation and thinking about the other person in that situation is simple but profound, requiring well-developed, differentiated mental abilities. Empathy is other-focused, not self-focused. Someone with sociopathic tendencies can ‘read’ other people well and understand their emotions. But a sociopathic person reads others in order to manipulate or take advantage of that person. It is not empathy.

Read more here.

Are you getting along well with the Facebook and Google algorithms? What is the difference between liberty and freedom?

Mark talks about the importance of empathy, which he defines as understanding how another person thinks within his own frame of reference.

Muslim female attire exists to remind Muslim women that they are the creatures of their men.

What is the difference between liberty and freedom? Mark says freedom is absolute. Liberty is more than freedom. It is about responsibility and virtue.

The French are on their fifth republic, whereas the Americans are still on their first.

Mark briefly talks about the algorithms being employed by Facebook and Google.

The tyranny of a hyper present tense

Mark Steyn is thinking today about empathy. The Left now is unable to empathize, as identity politics has consumed them. There is also a sustained war on the past going on.

In demanding the past conform to the pieties of the present, we are saying there is no eternal human nature.

When you surrender your past you are also surrendering your future, because you are breaking the compact between the past, present and future.

Do you think women are more sensitive and "empathetic" in relationships?

Helen Smith asks at PJ Media,

Why is it we always hear about how sensitive and "empathetic" women are when it comes to relationships? It seems that women's ability to understand what men's emotions are is fair at best and often poor.

Read more here.

What a sweet guy!

Learn how to be compassionate, and empathetic, and human, no matter who you're dealing with.

Kristina Cook writes,

If we wish to persuade, we have to talk to people in a way that they can hear. If they shut us down from the start, we can't get anywhere.

I believe - I STRONGLY believe - that the left and the right, the regular folks who identify with one or the other (not the elected folks - that's another conversation) want the same things. We want to protect our most vulnerable populations. We want to thrive. We want everyone else to thrive, too. We want to protect our freedoms, and protect everyone else's freedoms. We want to be empowered to live our lives according to our own decisions.
We want the same things.

We may have different tactics on how to get there. We may have slightly different ideas about how all those things look. But in the end, those are minor differences.

If you want to be an agent of change, learn how to speak so others can hear you. Learn what they want, and how your principles serve those ends. Learn how to be compassionate, and empathetic, and human, no matter who you're dealing with. You will do much to advance the cause of the human race if you'll invest the effort to do these things.

What does not kill me makes me sadder

Did you know that

The swashbuckling George S. Patton, who braved death in his drive to Germany and was worried about his role in a peacetime world, was paralyzed in a minor traffic accident shortly after the Allied victory — and on the day before he was to go home and leave postwar Europe for good. He died not on the battlefield, but painfully in bed in a military hospital in Germany.

Victor Davis Hanson ponders today about sadness, irony, narcissism, and learning from pain:

At best, all we can do, I think in our ignorance of causation, is to cover our bets and tread lightly and remain observant — keeping humble and modest in occasional good fortune (given so often that our blessings turn out to be dependent on the work of other friends and benefactors), while staying resolute in more frequent times of chaos and disaster, to be able to help and offer sanctuary to others.

It is wise to remember the good dead and emulate their example rather than to be caught up with the mediocre of the present. I certainly spend more time recalling the voice of my mother than listening to the televised psychodramas of our elite. Faith and transcendence in the end matter most, whether for us who believe in God and an eternal soul, or for the more agnostic humanists who trust that one’s good works now can affect others following them, from raising good children to planting an olive tree.

...As parents age, they gain perspective and calm, but also at the cost of growing pessimism or even a dangerous sense of preordination. These can be deadly pathologies as they take away the necessary spirit and audacity, so important in getting up one more morning and heading on to the next mission. (My 86-year-old grandfather was putting in new end posts in the vineyard on the day before he had a heart attack and died; my 80-year-old Swedish grandfather was breaking a young horse in his last few months.)

All the clichés that you all have heard about losing a child, and which we all of the uninitiated may have found strange or foreign — “I wished it was me,” “How unfair that parents outlive children,” “How did I cause this,” “Why didn’t I do that or this,” “I should have been a better parent, listener, friend, helper, benefactor, etc.” — I assure you turn out hardly to be clichés, but simply reflect over the centuries what is innate in every parent’s brain in extremis.

As we age and try to make sense of nonsense, we have only the solace that what is inexplicable now will be most explicable soon, and that we are not natives, as we assume, here, but refugees from home somewhere else, and that what seems all too real and hopeless we hope is a just a dream of what will be soon very real and hopeful.

I would amend Nietzsche’s often quoted line, “from life’s school of war: what does not kill me makes me stronger,” to something like “what does not kill me, makes me sadder,” and leave it to fate whether sadder in the end proves stronger or wiser.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I try to read and excerpt everything VDH writes. This is the first time, though, that I was reduced to tears, as he tells us about his grandaughter and the death of his wonderful daughter Savannah. Read it here.

Needed: priority shift

Are you failing to prepare your kids for the impending robot takeover? Sam Chaltain writes:

now, in the shadow of the technological singularity, there are a slew of movies about humankind’s desire to transcend the biological limits of body and brain.

Singularity is that moment when the whole game board changes, when artificial intelligence pulls even with, and then rapidly exceeds (or merges with), human intelligence.

Chaltain recommends that we should

Start focusing less on what we want kids to know and more on who we want them to become. And the good news is that lots of communities are already doing this — not by designing futuristic curricula or teaching kids how to build a better robot, but by recognizing that content is merely the means by which young people develop new skills and habits to carry them successfully through life and to equip them to solve problems we can’t even conceive of.

At the Mission Hill School in Boston, educators have decided four characteristics matter more than anything else: forethought, perseverance, production and reflection. At the MC2 School in New Hampshire, there are 18 habits to work toward, from critical thinking to self-direction. At the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia there are five — inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection; and at Indianapolis’s Spring Mill Elementary, it’s a set of 12, which includes traits such as empathy, integrity and cooperation. These qualities are timeless, as critical in an era of computerized knowledge as they are now. These schools demonstrate that our education system doesn’t need to aspire to a single, universal set of facts to impart. Instead, every school needs to decide for itself that, of all the characteristics the ideal graduates could embody, which ones must they hold to be successful in the world, no matter the decade?

The latest research about how people learn affirms the value of this priority shift. As Paul Tough writes in “How Children Succeed,” “What matters most in a child’s development is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence.” California State University’s Arthur Costa makes a similar point in “Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind.” “We are interested in enhancing the ways students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce it,” he writes. “The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not only having information, but also knowing how to act on it.”

Read more here.

Adolescence: freeing the frontal cortex from the straightjacket of genes

Robert Sapolsky observes that

adolescence is the time of life when someone is most likely to join a cult, kill, be killed, invent an art form, help overthrow a dictator, ethnically cleanse a village, care for the needy, transform physics, adopt a hideous fashion style, commit to God, and be convinced that all the forces of history have converged to make this moment the most consequential ever, fraught with peril and promise.

The teenage brain is unique. It’s not merely an adult brain that is half-cooked or a child’s brain left unrefrigerated for too long. Its distinctiveness arises from a key region, the frontal cortex, not being fully developed. This largely explains the turbulence of adolescence. It also reflects an important evolutionary pressure.

The frontal cortex is the most recently evolved part of the human brain. It’s where the sensible mature stuff happens: long-term planning, executive function, impulse control, and emotional regulation. It’s what makes you do the right thing when it’s the harder thing to do. But its neurons are not fully wired up until your mid-20s.

What about the effects of peer pressure?

Teenage vulnerability to peer pressure is worsened by the fact that such pressure rarely takes the form of hesitant adolescents coerced into joining in the fun of committing random acts of kindness. Instead, pressure disproportionately takes the form of “deviance training,” increasing the likelihood of risky sexual behavior, poor health habits, substance abuse, and violence. As has been said, the greatest crime-fighting tool available to society is a 30th birthday.

The pain in not belonging:

One brain-imaging study reveals the neural depths of adolescent pain in not belonging. Put someone in a scanner to play a video game with two other individuals, and manipulate things so that the subject believes they are being ostracized. In adults, this social exclusion activates the amygdala along with other limbic regions associated with pain, disgust, anger, and sadness. But then the frontal cortex kicks in—“Come on, it’s a stupid game”—and the limbic structures quiet down. Do the same with an adolescent and the frontal cortex remains silent and that agonized limbic network of teenage angst wails.

What about the tsunamis of hormones?

The slowpoke frontal cortex is not the only explanation for teen behavior. Another factor comes into play that keeps that teen brain off balance, namely gonadal hormones like estrogen and progesterone in females, and testosterone in males. This helps explain why adolescence is more turbulent than childhood—the frontal cortex is immature at both ages, but the tsunamis of hormones haven’t started in pre-adolescents. Hormones have numerous effects on the function of both the limbic system and frontal cortex. Testosterone decreases the ability of the frontal cortex to communicate with and rein in the amygdala. Not surprisingly, landmarks of adolescent maturation in brain and behavior are less related to chronological age than to time since puberty.

If the frontal cortex is the last part of the brain to fully mature, it is by definition the brain region least shaped by that genome and most sculpted by experience. With each passing day, the frontal cortex is more the creation of what life has thrown at you, and thus who you become.

Sure, adolescence has its down sides, but it has its abundant pluses—the inventiveness, the optimism, the empathy. Its biggest plus is that it allows the frontal cortex time to develop. There’s no other way we could navigate the ever-increasing complexity of our social world.

The link has been fixed. Please read more here.

"Father forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing."

Do you have a parent or child you haven't talked to in years? How can we see them through eyes of mercy and kindness? Is it too late to connect or reconnect?

Is it possible that someone is there on the other side of the road, someone like you, stripped, knocked out, unable even to ask for help? Might that person be wounded also?

Consider the words of Jesus on the cross as He struggled for breath, His body so bloodied He was unrecognizable. He had done no evil, no wrong at all, ever.

Yet He was executed as a criminal. Jesus hung there, pinioned like a dove, and uttered the most startling words ever: “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”

Unwieldy

Whose decision is it? Jesus did not make us follow HIm. He was clear that was what He wanted, but the choice is still ours. James Martin wrote a piece at Busted Halo in 2008 about Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who directed "The Last Days of Judas Iscariot." Perhaps the best actor of his day, Hoffman recently died from a heroin overdose. When he was a boy Hoffman studied to become a Catholic, and was influenced by his sister's profound faith. Hoffman is quoted by Martin as saying,

“My image of Jesus is someone who is exciting,” he said after the show had closed.

“Were he alive today, he would be causing havoc!”

More often it is that Jesus who in his upending of the status quo proves a threat to those around him.

“Jesus forgave his persecutors. If he were around today, he would be doing things that would be so… unwieldy!”

Hoffman taught his actors in a way similar to the way Jesus taught His disciples, through stories that revealed truth.

We lost another talented human being to addiction. Alissa Wilkinson writes that Hoffman

talked about how painful the work was to him, how it hurt to inhabit another person that way.

The pain, perhaps, ended up being too much to bear.

But the sacrifice for those who make things is to think of the other, to put themselves in someone else’s shoes over and over again – whether it’s your character or your audience. That is not comfortable. It is difficult to deal with. It can drive you toward things you know aren’t good for you, and can make you do things that wind up hurting others, too. But it is certainly a hallmark of bad art that the artist/writer appears to have thought only of himself.