Living in More Than One World

It’s always interesting when a person’s legacy is carried on long after his or her death. That’s the case with Napoleon Hill, perhaps best known for Think and Grow Rich. Despite its title, the book is not just a guide to financial wealth but to all-around success and personal development. He wrote it on the personal suggestion of Andrew Carnegie, to intensively study the success secrets of some of the major figures of his era, including Thomas Edison and John D.  Rockefeller.  It and other books by Hill, (1883-1970), remain popular in libraries and bookstores worldwide. Sue Ellen Ross of The Post-Tribune in Gary, Ind., recently did a feature story, Top motivator continues to inspire, about the field trip of a high school band to an open house at the Napoleon Hill Foundation’s World Learning Center at Purdue University Calumet. The foundation carries on Hill’s teachings through publications, seminars and distance learning classes. The article explains that the students listened to a presentation by Dr. J.B. Hill, a West Virginia physician who is Hill’s grandson. He said that he didn’t know Hill well, but reading Think and Grow Rich changed his life. The students also walked the labyrinth on the center’s grounds. Labyrinths were not in vogue in Hill’s day; but their calm, deliberate and meditative qualities fit in well with his emphasis on harnessing the power of the mind to make meaningful achievements in life. I can attest to the quiet intensity of labyrinths after walking the indoor one (there is also one outdoors) at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco last year. Hill would probably appreciate how the foundation has helped to modernize his message by tapping into the power of an ancient concept.

It’s back to guardian.co.uk today for a double-treat: its extensive, ongoing coverage of the Guardian Hay Festival in Wales, running from May 21-31, as well as The Book that changed my life, in which Nicole Jackson interviews 28 festival participants, who each provide a paragraph on their crucial reading. The event is primarily literary, but features a wide array of public figures: authors, poets, comedians, architects and politicians.  There is also Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The main page has a considerable amount of video and podcasts, as well as blogs and articles about the festival. One of the presenters has proved unexpectedly timely: poet Ruth Padel, who in controversy resigned her position as the first female Professor of Poetry at Oxford University only nine days after being elected.  Read more in the Guardian’s May 26 interview, Ruth Padel: Oxford poetry smear campaign could have been a conspiracy. She is also the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, and you can see a video of her reading from Darwin: A Life in Poems. The Book that changed my life surveys a cross-section of people, including the novelist Zoe Heller, historians Simon Schama and Antonia Fraser, and Alain de Botton, whom I featured in an earlier post. I’ll leave it to you to read the books that changed their lives and those of the other interviewees, but suffice to say that it’s a pretty eclectic and surprising list. It would be wonderful to attend this festival in person, but for most of us that’s not practical. Thank goodness we live in an age when technology allows us the next best thing.

I’ve just discovered Harriet Swain’s delightful weekly series, How to Be a Student, on guardian.co.uk. It’s been running for a year and a half, and it’s all online. Although these concise columns are aimed at British university undergrads, they have broader relevance to anyone involved in ongoing learning (even if it’s informal) or teaching, no matter where you live.  I found it especially interesting as next week I begin a new teaching semester at The Catholic University of America School of Library and Information Science. Each column is titled The Art of…; May 26’s is The art of asking questions. Swain touches on not just studying skills in these columns, but also life skills that have relevance beyond the classroom. While this type of counsel could come off as didactic in the wrong hands, she adopts just the right tone, providing sensible and realistic advice in a witty and friendly voice.  In The art of asking questions, she says university is less about finding answers than learning to ask the right questions. She suggests continual practice related to what you want to learn: start with broad self-questions beginning with what you’re trying to achieve and work toward more specifics, such as why a particular book has been assigned, what point the author is trying to make, etc. From this follows asking questions in class and emailing questions to the professor. “Asking questions can help you to hone and clarify your ideas,” Swain writes, “but it’s a good idea to understand the difference between asking a question and randomly thinking aloud.”

I’ve read many references over the years to the BBC’s Reith Lectures, which have been given yearly (except in 1992) since 1948, to “advance public understanding and debate about significant issues of contemporary interest,” in honor of the BBC’s first director-general. But I didn’t realize how much material was available on past lectures – and the upcoming series – until finding producer Jennifer Clarke’s BBC Radio 4 May 25 blog post ‘Multiplatforming’ the Reith Lectures. Clarke explains that this year’s lectures, “A New Citizenship,” by Harvard government professor Michael Sandel, in addition to the traditional live lectures and broadcasts on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service, will also have an array of social media and BBC radio, podcast and website activity. Sandel will be continuing a tradition that started with the philosopher Bertrand Russell (“Authority And The Individual”) and that has included many other distinguished lecturers, including the historian Arnold Toynbee (“The World and The West,” 1952), economist John Kenneth Galbraith (“The New Industrial State,” 1966), historian and former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin (“America and The World Experience,” 1975), the poet-playwright Wole Soyinka (“Climate of Fear,” 2004) and the conductor Daniel Barenboim (“In the Beginning Was Sound,” 2006). Sandel’s lectures will be broadcast beginning June 9 on BBC Radio 4, and June 13 on the BBC World Service. You can also listen to the 2008 lectures, “Chinese Vistas,” by Yale professor Jonathan Spence, and selected earlier lectures linked from that page. For the great majority of us who can’t be there in person, this sounds like a great self-education opportunity for the summer and beyond.

In an earlier post, I wrote about Ry Cooder and Nick Lowe’s upcoming European tour, and about the standard of musical excellence maintained over many years by both musicians, as well as their ability to work outside of their comfort zones. I had interviewed and written extensively about Lowe in my music writing days, though I never interviewed or met Cooder. Now comes word from Cooder’s record label, Nonesuch, that he has a collection of fiction, Los Angeles Stories, that will be made available only on the tour. This follows a novella that came with his recent album I, Flathead. Cooder is an embodiment of living in more than one world; as a musician working in many genres, record producer (including the eight million-selling Cuban music album Buena Vista Social Club and the subsequent documentary), soundtrack composer, musicologist and now author. The Nonesuch page links to Ry, Flathead; an extensive, unabridged interview of Cooder by Tony Scherman, in stopsmilingonline.com, the wide-ranging website of Stop Smiling magazine. It’s a fascinating conversation about Cooder’s life and work; especially how Buena Vista Social Club changed his life. One area I found particularly interesting was the crucial role of research in his work as a writer and musician. And be sure to read his comments at the end of the interview about the importance of learning and continually advancing your abilities.

Ira Jackson, the dean of Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at the Claremont Graduate University, has written The View From Drucker: Drucker Apps, in the May 23 Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, about an innovative regular feature on the Drucker Institute website. Twice a month, since January 29 of this year, the Institute takes a topic and includes information on various facets from Peter Drucker, in the form of excerpts from relevant passages of his books, material from the voluminous online Drucker Archives and videos or audio files featuring Drucker or outside experts. There is also the full text related to the topic from The Drucker Difference columns on BusinessWeek.com by Rick Wartzman, the director of the Drucker Institute. You can subscribe, or access Drucker Apps from the website. “Each bi-weekly App,” Jackson writes, “is designed to be timely and play off something in the recent news.”  He describes the May 9 feature on volunteering, which has eight different features, including a short Drucker video, and the text of a speech Drucker gave to the Economic Club of Washington in 1991. The Drucker Apps for May 23 is about finding and keeping jobs. The ten features — one section is intriguingly headed “Help Wanted” (if you help yourself first)” – include the full text of a 1957 speech Drucker gave to the Eleventh International Management Congress in Paris, “The Problems of Maintaining Continuous and Full Employment.” There is also a video and book excerpt from William Cohen, president of the Institute of Leader Arts, and a former PhD student of Peter Drucker.  A final note: there is a Q&A with Rick Wartzman about The Drucker Institute and The Drucker Societies in my forthcoming book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life.

I’m about to begin a teaching semester, and many of us will be either teaching, taking classes, pursuing degrees or involved in self-learning ventures this summer. In that spirit, you should benefit from Tad Waddington’s short and to-the-point May 22 Smarts blog on Psychology Today, Smarts: Four things worth learning about learning. Waddington, author of the book Lasting Contribution: How to Think, Plan, and Act to Accomplish Meaningful Work, demonstrates how with additional focused effort and thinking about what we are trying to learn, we’ll gain greater understanding and recall. This is especially true today when we are bombarded by so much material online, in print and on TV and radio. If you add that to the material you are teaching or learning, it can create serious information overload.  He suggests such strategies as reading and re-reading a passage for understanding, but then writing out or saying aloud its meaning.  Also: doing something backward as well as forward (it seems like this one can be fairly tricky), retesting to see if you really understand what you’re trying to learn or accomplish (see how he references Peter Drucker on this one) and trying to understand the theory or principle behind a fact, not just the fact itself. He intriguingly calls the latter behavior “a self-imposed learning disability.” That concept gives us something to think about as we transition to the summer months: how do we hold ourselves back by the way we think and learn?

The Boston.com Managing Your Money: Personal finance advice feature has a brief, intriguing May 20 entry by a local accountant, Jamie Downey, The Best Financial Advice I Ever Received. Downey expands on advice he heard from the author/sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer; to invest your time, rather than spend it. Downey examines his own life in a variety of categories, to demonstrate how he invests his time in various activities. His advice and personal example goes beyond finances to give an interesting blueprint for the intelligent, productive use of time. (Most of this time, by the way, is outside of the workplace. It would be interesting to see a similar list for time at work.) He identifies some areas of his life that he tries to use more productively, such as selective television viewing, and using travel and commuting hours productively. He then provides brief examples of  how he invests time in the following areas: reading, exercising, building relationships, time with family and thinking. He says that reading is the activity he increased the most, as the result of Gitomer’s advice. He devotes at least an hour a day to it, usually in the early morning, with coffee. You can probably add other categories to those included here for personal investment of time. But this is thought-provoking and seems reasonable and doable. Just as Gitomer inspired Downey, the latter has now inspired his readers to improve not only their finances, but the quality of each day of life.

Sometimes the best way to make sense of our own life and ultimately improve how we live is reading about how other people describe and interpret their existence. Library Journal has done a real service with Short Takes: 50 Summer Memoirs for the Beach, Backwoods, or Flu Bunker, as selected with brief annotations by a team of reviewers. Whether or not you take LJ’s advice to employ these as beach reading rather than novels, it’s fun reading these capsule descriptions of the books, many by authors who are not well known, but sound like they have led interesting lives. Some of the authors faced life-changing circumstances. It could be that reading about what they endured will help put our own situation into perspective. Although many are unfamiliar to me, some names caught my eye right away. Novelist and Financial Times columnist Susie Boyt, who is the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud and the daughter of painter Lucien Freud, a fact the reviewer says she “glosses over,” has My Judy Garland Life. Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball and other non-fiction business and sports classics has Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood. And then there is Lydia Lunch, a mainstay of the ‘70s punk rock scene, whom I hadn’t thought about since my music writing and business days. Will Work For Drugs, according to the reviewer, “explores the perils of addiction over three decades with a haunting style that will leave you uncomfortable and awed.”  Finally, the LJ page also has links to its earlier “Short Takes” on memoirs.

Check out Chip Conley’s wide-ranging May 18 ideas in Huffington Post, What We Measure Matters. Conley is both a practitioner and a writer; as founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based Joie de Vivre Hospitality and the author of such books as PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow. The latter is about applying psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory to the business world, taking a concept developed for the individual and applying it organizationally. In his post, Conley discusses how his company asks questions of its employees to help them consider the highest levels of attaining meaning from one’s work and making a positive difference in the experience of the people they serve. Their answers, in his view, help even hourly workers performing tasks such as cleaning toilets see the larger context of their work. Conley says the small country of Bhutan is doing something similar to the application of Maslow’s theory with its Gross National Happiness index, moving away from the traditional economic measurement of Gross Domestic Product to less tangible, but highly important, measures of personal satisfaction and well-being. He wrote about his visit to Bhutan to learn more about the index and how it played out in the lives of its people in a May 11 post in Huffington Post, The Happiest Place on the Planet? For more on Bhutan and its index, see the May 7 Seth Mydans article in The New York Times, Thimphu Journal: Recalculating Happiness in a Himalayan Kingdom.