Living in More Than One World

It’s not surprising that the new book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, by Jonah Berger, is itself catching on and getting lots of attention. Berger, who is in his early 30s, is the James G. Campbell Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies and teaches about how and why products and ideas go viral and get other forms of attention, both online and offline. These days it’s not only companies and other organizations that have to continually get the word out in effective ways about their offerings. Individuals have to do it too, and the marketplace is crowded, confusing and noisy.

Berger’s media attention has been impressive, especially for a new author. The book was reviewed in The New York Times and Boston Globe. He did a Q&A, “‘Contagious’ explains secret behind infectious ideas,” with my former colleague Sharon Jayson, in USA TODAY. Fast Company ran a profile by Lydia Dishman, “Why Ideas And Products Become Contagious: The Jonah Berger Formula,” and has also been running excerpts online. This Sunday, March 10th, he’ll be doing a book signing in Austin at the SXSW® Interactive Festival.

In 2011, after reading and being impressed by one of his scholarly articles, I interviewed Berger for a brief article on word of mouth marketing for the journal I edit, Leader to Leader. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover recently that he had published his book, which he told Jayson in USA TODAY is “about understanding why people talk and share. You could think about it as understanding conversations — the science of what we talk about.”

Improving your life at any time of year can seem overwhelming. That is especially true for mid-late January, with many people trying to implement new year’s resolutions or similar goals and strategies. Last year I wrote about keeping on track at a time when the weather is bleak and things don’t seem to be changing fast enough. I believe that my thoughts from last year are still valid, but you might want to add the ideas of Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman to the mix. I wrote about him in 2009 and 2011, and he has a new book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. It has drawn lots of attention, in part because it reminds us that not all self-help is helpful, and that we don’t necessarily help the situation by constantly putting pressure on ourselves to improve.

Burkeman addressed the resolutions issue last month in a guest article for Newsweek/The Daily Beast, which among other things introduced me to “the Buddhist-influenced Japanese psychologist Shoma Morita.” He quotes this advice from Morita, about essentially starting where you are, with what you have, warts-and-all, to “begin taking action now, while being neurotic or imperfect or a procrastinator or unhealthy or lazy or any other label by which you inaccurately describe yourself.”  Burkeman’s clear-eyed, realistic and fairly gentle way of bringing you back to earth is also evident in his latest column, about creative thinking, another area that is fraught with unreasonable expectations. A key takeaway for me is that there are many paths to improvement, happiness and enlightenment; you have to find what is right for you. The best authors in these genres forge a direct connection with their readers, a worthy aspiration that can slowly lead to improved lives.

It’s been three weeks since I’ve been in Claremont, California; where I spent several days at the Drucker School and elsewhere at Claremont Graduate University and The Claremont Colleges. Now the new, Fall 2012 issue of The Flame, CGU’s excellent quarterly magazine, is available in print and online. I’ve been reading this regularly since my first visit to Claremont in 2002, when I began researching my book Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life.
The article  “A Hunger for Change” profiles Badiul Alam Majumdar, Vice President and Country Director, The Hunger Project-Bangladesh. More than 20 years ago, he gave up a tenured teaching position at Washington State University to return to Bangladesh, the country of his birth, to make a different type of difference in the world. He was one of Drucker’s earliest students at Claremont in the early 1970s.
What is the relationship of football and other sports to positive psychology and flow? That is what retired NFL player Damian Vaughn is trying to determine, as related in the article “Football, Flow, and Finding Your Way After Tearing an Achilles Tendon.” Vaughn now consults with athletes and business people on finding flow and peak performance, and is studying at CGU’s School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences (SBOS). He’s also working on two pilot studies at CGU’s Quality of Life Research Center with the founder of flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whom I wrote about for USA TODAY in 2003.
There is also an enlightening Q&A, “The Mormon Moment, In Context” (three pages in the magazine, but extended online) with Patrick Q. Mason, the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies and Associate Professor of North American Religion at CGU’s School of Religion (SOR). Besides providing additional context on Mormonism and Mitt Romney, Mason also discusses his own life as a scholar and author, including the important role The Autobiography of Malcolm X has played in that life. “One of the reasons I like Malcolm,” Mason says, “personally and spiritually, is because he was a spiritual pilgrim. His life is a remarkable one of assimilating truth and searching for truth.”

The new semester has started for many teachers and students, and more will join in after Labor Day. Although I am not teaching this semester, I’ve decided that now is a good time to write an updated version of my 2010 post about self-management for the new semester and school year. Even if you are not a teacher or student, it’s possible that teaching is part of your work, and all of us are engaged in continuous learning.
1.    Get Attuned to Your Well-Being. The influential psychologist/author Martin E.P. Seligman has extended his work on happiness into this area, under the acronym PERMA: positive emotion (including happiness), engagement, relationships, meaning and achievement.
2.    Look For Flow. Mihaly Csiskszentmihalyi introduced the world to the concept of flow. He is another psychologist/author who, like Seligman, is connected to the field of positive psychology. If you are in this state, inside or outside of class, you are completely engaged in a task and lose sense of time.
3.   Maintain Your Health. Because teaching and learning can be draining and stressful, it’s important to engage in exercise, and such mind-body techniques as yoga or the Alexander Technique.
4.    Connect to the World Beyond the Classroom. You can approach your own subjects with a fresher mind by occasional reading outside your discipline. Also, try to set a goal of attending one lecture or presentation by a visiting speaker on campus (or another campus in your area) in subjects different from your own.
5.    Understand Your Present Reality. You’ll have more mental space to teach and study if you understand what constitutes your “total life.”
I hope you find this streamlined set of tips to be useful on your teaching and learning journeys, this semester and beyond.

Last week I wrote a guest post for LexisNexis Government Info Pro, Creating Your Total Life List for 2012. Much has been written at the end of last year and the beginning of this one about new beginnings. But as we get deeper into January, it’s easy for the fresh feeling to wear off. No matter how many systems you use to better your life, having handy reminders for self-improvement are always helpful:
1. Time management and productivity: Jason Womack, whose book Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More, will be released next month, is interviewed by Meridith Levinson for CIO.com, in Time Management: 6 Ways to Improve Your Productivity. (Meridith  interviewed me in 2009, for Peter Drucker as Life Coach: Book Shares His Wisdom.) What’s valuable about Jason’s advice is that it is work-specific, and we can never get enough good tips in this realm.
2. Happiness: This a topic gets hotter every year. For evidence see the January-February 2012 Harvard Business Review, with a number of happiness-themed articles, including Shawn Achor’s Positive Intelligence. Shawn wrote a terrific book, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, in 2010. Also check out The Happiness Advantage: An Interview with Shawn Achor, on the World of Psychology blog.
3.  Mindfulness and Stress Reduction: The British duo of Danny Penman and Mark Williams, authors of Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World, have a guest piece for CNN.com, Destress your life in 10 easy steps. Also have a look at their recent posts for Psychology Today. For a personal account of the benefits of mindfulness meditation, see Newsweek’s Mindfulness Meditation Is Rediscovered, by Amy Gross, the former editor in chief of O, the Oprah Magazine.
4. Lifelong Learning: Opportunities abound, from taking classes (both in person and online) to self-directed learning from books and articles in print and online. For quick, painless tips and idea-starters, check out Newsweek’s 31 Ways to Get Smarter in 2012.
Obviously there are many other categories, strategies and techniques for improving your life this year. But any one of the four above would be a great place to start.

Margaret Heffernan poses a stark question in the title of her recent entry on Huffington Post, Is Daniel Kahneman Really the World’s Greatest Living Psychologist? Kahneman, the Princeton University Nobel laureate who currently has a huge best-seller in Thinking, Fast and Slow, has been getting lots of media attention as his book has climbed the charts. What’s really valuable about Heffernan’s post is bringing together short descriptions of other eminent psychologists who have developed followings beyond their own field.
Before his hit book, Kahneman’s work was often referenced in business books, especially those that are oriented towards the mind and personal/professional development. But other psychologists have gotten that treatment as well, including another in Heffernan’s post, Stanford University’s Carol Dweck. Like Kahneman, she wrote a book for a non-specialist readership, in her case the terrific Mindset:The New Psychology of  Success. Her work was featured prominently in Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and she’s also been written about by Malcolm Gladwell. Besides Dweck, two other Stanford psychologists are in the post, both of whom have done ground-breaking work: Albert Bandura (including his fascinating theory of self-efficacy) and Philip Zimbardo, whose infamous Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 was later described in his own book for a general audience, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.
As Heffernan notes, whether or not Kahneman is our greatest living psychologist is ultimately beside the point.  She writes that it is wonderful that we live in a time when so many of these people “are alive and productive, doing elegant and thoughtful work with immediate and lasting relevance to how we live our lives.” And it’s also true that as a society, the fact that the works of mind-oriented authors like Kahneman (not to mention Gladwell, Pink, Dan Ariely and so many others) reach the best-seller lists is surely a good sign.

The most valuable books for personal transformation are often short, practical and to-the-point. That is an apt description of Laura Goodrich’s just-released Seeing Red Cars: Driving Yourself, Your Team, and Your Organization to a Positive Future. Laura is the co-owner of On Impact Productions; and also a consultant, radio/TV/film host and a fellow Berrett-Koehler author. You can read a free excerpt from her book and see her new promotional video at her page on the B-K website. I met Laura last June at the B-K Authors Cooperative Marketing Workshop. I wasn’t surprised that her book is full of solid, actionable advice, because in one of the exercises during the workshop, we were in the same “co-consulting” group to briefly discuss areas in our professional lives that we wanted to work on. I found her to be genuinely thoughtful and interesting/interested, while helping me to think about new ways to approach problems. That’s a big premise of her book: how we think about what we want in life determines not only how we act – or don’t act – but also what we create and receive, personally and professionally. We get more of what we focus on, and for many of us, we focus on what we don’t want, rather than what we do want. She covers both the personal and organizational levels, with exercises to help you determine your passions, interests, goals and values. What particularly interests me is her material on being well-rounded. Her added focus on family and friends, health/fitness, personal finance, spirituality/faith, volunteerism and other areas provides a strong added dimension beyond the workplace. Dr. Ellen Weber, a brain researcher who is interviewed in the book, also has an interesting post about it in her new Forbes blog, Mind Makeover. One final note: the company you keep has an effect on how you think and view the world. Remember this Goodrich suggestion from Seeing Red Cars this weekend and beyond: “Hang around with people who have very positive thinking.”

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the sudden, untimely death at forty-five of Richard Carlson, the psychologist/author of the best-selling Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff series of self-help books.  I devoted nearly a page and a half of my book, in a section on leaving your legacy, to Carlson’s example. I wrote that I twice interviewed and wrote about him for USA TODAY. In our telephone conversations, he seemed very in line with his image: a genuinely nice guy, who had important things to say, and who was adept at getting his ideas across in reader/listener friendly ways. (I happened to come across his phone number in an old address book the other day; a somewhat eerie experience, considering how close it was to the anniversary of his death.) At this time of year especially, it would benefit many of us to consider two things about his legacy: 1. The importance – despite the difficulty – of heeding his message about not getting too stressed out about little things (even if they don’t seem little at the time). His books conveyed the related message that many of our problems can be dealt with by stopping to consider options before leaping to negative conclusions. 2. He put a lot of care and devotion into his work each day, and part of the result was many books, web materials and articles that will continue to nourish people for years. His life example helps prove that it is what we do daily that contributes to our legacy for the future. Carlson also wrote about the fact that not all problems are small: his 2002 book What About the Big Stuff? Finding Strength and Moving Forward When the Stakes Are High deals with tough topics in ways that are ultimately positive, optimistic and life-affirming. His work has been extended and expanded upon by his widow, Kristine Carlson, who is a prolific author and media presence in her own right.

To further your introspection about careers and the workplace, read the thought-provoking Huffington Post entry by the business psychologist and psychotherapist Douglas LaBier, The 4.0 Career Is Coming…Are You Ready? I took an engaging continuing education class taught by LaBier in 1999 for the Smithsonian Associates, in Washington. He also blogs for Psychology Today. His 4.0 post outlines the different stages of careers. In some ways, the ladders from 1.0 to 4.00 are reminiscent of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. LaBier starts with the most basic to the most evolved (and for many, elusive) 4.0, which reaches beyond the 3.0 search for meaning, purpose and balance in one’s work to assuring that it has a positive impact on others. “In essence,” LaBier writes, “the 4.0 careerist is motivated by a sense of service to and connection with the larger human community through the product or service he or she contributes to.” With high unemployment, work in the 3.0 and 4.0 spheres may seem like an unattainable luxury for many. Yet considering work in LaBier’s framework is a useful exercise to help us think about and determine what we really want from how we spend so much of our time and effort. And even if a career of this type may not be possible now, it doesn’t mean that always will be the case.  LaBier also provides a list of 10 points “to assess yourself and your work environment in relation to the 4.0 careerist.” Some of these can be thought of as best-case scenarios; the type of work environment you’d like to aim for, but that probably does not exist in many places. Then again, if you are in the right position, you can work towards creating these ideal environments, for you and others. One final thought: 4.0, as evolved as it is, probably isn’t the ultimate. What will constitute the 5.0 Career, and beyond?

Today’s post was inspired by a suggestion from my friend and Catholic University colleague Kimberly Hoffman. The new school year has started, and both teachers and students need a framework for managing themselves in navigating the fall and spring semesters. Consider these tips in the days and months ahead: 1. Coursework can be all-consuming. Make sure you are maintaining your health by taking some time for exercise and mind-body activities such as yoga or the Alexander Technique. 2. Determine what constitutes your “total life” during the school year. Make a list of all your activities and commitments (especially work and family obligations) inside and outside of the classroom. You will then be better able to summon the proper effort for schoolwork. 3. Make communication a personal priority, both in speaking and listening. Are you clear about the commitments and expectations for each class? 4. Inside and outside of class, look for activities that encourage the highly-engaged, mentally stimulating feeling of flow, as outlined by the psychologist/author Mihaly Csiskszentmihalyi. 5. Make time for reading of books in subject matters outside of what you are studying or teaching, even if it’s just a few minutes each night before falling asleep, or while riding on the bus or train. 6. Stretch beyond your regular subjects by attending at least one public lecture or presentation by a visiting speaker on campus (or at another local school) in another discipline. 7. Look for the sense of meaning in what you are studying or teaching, and how it relates to your life, now and in the future. You can help maintain a proper attitude and sense of belief in your abilities by applying principles from positive psychology. No matter how many of these seven tips for self-management you employ, I hope you find them useful. Additional suggestions are welcome!