Through the Valley of the Kwai - Part 2

Last time (see "Through the Valley of the Kwai - Part 1"), I introduced an incredibly powerful and deeply inspirational book, Through the Valley of the Kwai by Ernest Gordon.  Gordon was an officer in the British army during World War II, serving in Southeast Asia.  He escaped with a couple of fellow officers after the British surrendered the island of Singapore, but he was eventually captured by the Japanese and spent the remainder of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp, working on the infamous Burma Railway.  

I was impressed by the transformation that occurred in the entire prison camp.  As I stated in the last post, the Japanese soldiers who were running the camp were particularly cruel to the prisoners-of-war, forcing them to labor for long hours to exhaustion with very little food and water.  The conditions were extremely harsh, and most, if not all, of the prisoners suffered from a number of tropical diseases, including malaria, beriberi, malnutrition (leading to starvation), typhoid fever, dysentery, and skin ulcers.  As you can imagine, conditions in the camp deteriorated swiftly, and it quickly became "every man for himself."  Gordon wrote, "As conditions steadily worsened, as starvation, exhaustion, and disease took an ever-growing toll, the atmosphere in which we lived was incredibly poisoned by selfishness, hatred, and fear.  We were slipping rapidly down the scale of degradation."  The "law of the jungle" prevailed.

At some point, the mood changed.  Small acts of kindness turned into even bigger acts of generosity.  Prisoners went from stealing from each other, to giving up their most prized possessions to one another.  They started sharing their food with the sick and dying.  Gordon wrote, "Generosity proved contagious...It was dawning on us all - officers and 'other ranks' alike - that the law of the jungle is not the law for men.  We had seen for ourselves how quickly it could strip us of our humanity and reduce us to levels lower than the beasts...Where previously men had fought for themselves, now they were ready to die for one another."

Gordon's own spiritual transformation was mirrored by that of the rest of the camp.  As his fellow prisoners embraced religion, Gordon would become one of their spiritual leaders.  He wrote, "The dominant motivation for such wholesome embracing of religion was not love and faith, but fear: fear of the unknown, fear of suffering, fear of the terror of the night, fear of death itself, fear that made for division rather than for community...Faith flourished in the midst of despair, and hope was born in the midst of hell."

The prisoners found strength in their faith and in each other.  Gordon wrote, "Death was still with us - no doubt about that.  But we were being slowly freed from its destructive grip.  We were seeing for ourselves the sharp contrasts between the forces that make for life and those that make for death.  Selfishness, hatred, jealousy, and greed were all anti-life.  Love, self-sacrifice, mercy, and creative faith, on the other hand, were the essence of life, turning mere existence into living in its truest sense.  These were the gifts of God to men."

Ernest Gordon's personal story is quite remarkable, and I could never give it the justice it deserves.  In other words, READ THE BOOK!  

Through the Valley of the Kwai - Part 1

Every once in a while, I check out a book at our local public library based on a casual mention or recommendation from someone.  I honestly do not remember who recommended it, but I just finished Through the Valley of the Kwai by Ernest Gordon over the weekend.  I have to say that this was one of the best books that I have ever read!  It's right up there with Man's Search for Meaning by the Austrian neurologist, psychologist, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl.  It's been a few years since I've last read Frankl's book, but based on my recollection, the two books are very similar.  They are both profoundly written memoirs that explore the major themes of human suffering, resilience, and the search for meaning.  Whereas Frankl's memoir introduces us to his concept of logotherapy (literally "healing through meaning"), Gordon's source of resilience and ultimate redemption is through the spiritual renewal of his Christian faith.

Ernest Gordon died in 2002, but prior to that he had served as the Presbyterian Dean of the chapel at Princeton University.  In his 20's, Gordon served as an officer in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders infantry regiment of the British Army during World War II.  He fought in Southeast Asia and spent three years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, working on the infamous Burma Railway and bridge over the river Kwai (subject of the novel by the French author Pierre Boulle, which was made into a movie starring Sir Alec Guinness and William Holden in 1957).  The Japanese were particularly cruel to the prisoners-of-war, forcing them to labor for long hours to exhaustion with very little food and water.  The conditions were extremely harsh, and most, if not all, of the prisoners suffered from a number of tropical diseases, including malaria, beriberi, malnutrition (leading to starvation), typhoid fever, dysentery, and skin ulcers.  

Gordon suffered from all of these ailments and more (including acute appendicitis, which required emergency surgery performed under incredibly austere conditions).  He ended up with diphtheria, which nearly killed him.  He was actually moved to the camp's "death ward" for those prisoners who were felt to have no chance of survival.  It was only through the compassionate care by two of his fellow prisoners (primarily - there were others that certainly helped too) that he ultimately survived and slowly regained his health.  "Dusty Miller" was a devout Methodist and a gardener before the war, who relied heavily upon his Christian faith to persevere through his ordeal.  "Dinty" Moore was a devout Roman Catholic who Gordon knew very well.

While being nursed back to health, Gordon, who was an agnostic before the war, would have long conversations about faith with Dusty Miller in particular.  During one conversation about his past life as a gardener, Miller told Gordon, "When people are down on their knees weeding, they think only of the weeds and never of the flowers.  I like to grow flowers, not weeds.  But if I'm to grow flowers, I must deal with the weeds.  So I don't mind doing that."  Gordon began to understand that Miller's resilience came from his faith and his unique ability to see the good in everything.

During another conversation, Miller shared, "Here's a verse I've always found to be of help.  It makes us realize that God is closer than we think:  

No one could tell me where my soul might be,

I sought for God, but God eluded me, 

I sought my brother out and found all three, 

My soul, my God, and all humanity."

Gordon would write, "For the first time I understood.  Dusty was a Methodist - Dinty a Roman Catholic.  Yet in each, it was their faith that lent a special grace to their personalities; through them faith expressed a power, a presence greater than themselves.  I was beginning to see that life was infinitely more complex, and at the same time more wonderful, than I had ever imagined.  True, there was hatred.  But there was also love.  There was death, but there was also life.  God had not left us.  He was with us, calling us to live the divine life in fellowship.  I was beginning to feel the miracle that God was working in the Death Camp by the River Kwai."

During his recovery, Gordon underwent a spiritual transformation, largely as a result of both Miller's and Moore's example of faith.  He would begin to assist the prison camp's chaplain with religious services, and ultimately would lead those services for the rest of his time in captivity.  After the war, he would become an ordained minister, eventually finding his way to Princeton University.

Sadly, both of the individuals who were so instrumental in nursing Gordon back to health would not survive the war.  "Dusty Miller" was a devout Methodist who relied heavily upon his Christian faith to persevere.  Two weeks before being liberated, Miller was crucified by one of the Japanese guards who was frustrated with Miller's sense of calm while faced with incredible hardship.  "Dinty" Moore a devout Roman Catholic would die towards the end of the war as well, when an Allied submarine sank his unmarked prisoner transport ship.

Gordon concluded, "It was faith, I saw, that enabled us to transcend our environment, to appropriate what was good and true in our education and tradition, and thus prepare us to make decisions on matters of tumultuous consequence to us as human beings.  It was clear that the quest for meaning, the religious search, and the hunger for knowledge all go hand in hand."

Lt General Arthur E. Percival, who commanded the British forces in Malaysia during World War II would say, after the war, " Inspired by faith, the British soldiers in these camps displayed some of the finest qualities of their race.  Courageous under repression and starvation, patient through the long years of waiting, cheerful and dignified in the face of adversity, they steadfastly resisted all efforts of the Japanese to break their spirit and finally conquered."

I really enjoyed this book.  And there is so much left to cover.  While Ernest Gordon's own personal journey was remarkable, his description of what happened to his fellow prisoners-of-war is just as enlightening.  I will come back to that topic in my next post.

Once again...are leaders born or made?

A few weeks ago, I ended my post, "One more time on the elites..." with the statement, "I am still left to ponder if we will ever find a so-called leadership gene."  Perhaps I was a bit premature in making that statement, because a quick Google search using the phrase "leadership gene" took me to a study from 2013 published in the journal The Leadership Quarterly, "Born to lead? A twin design and genetic association study of leadership role occupancy".  More on that study in a moment.

As it turns out, the argument about whether leadership is nature versus nurture in origin has been going on since the time of the ancient Greeks.  The Greek philosopher Plato wrote in his masterpiece on political philosophy, The Republic, that, "we are not all alike; there are diversities of natures among us which are adapted to different occupations..."  In other words, at least according to Plato, some of us are born to be better at certain occupations than others.  He wrote further stating, "There will be discovered to be some natures who ought to...be leaders in the State; and others who are not born to be [leaders], and are meant to be followers rather than leaders."  Just as some of us are born to be better at certain occupations than others, some of us are natural (born) leaders.  If that were the case, there should be some kind of test that we could use to select our leaders.  However, even Plato recognized that this would be difficult when he wrote, "The selection [of leaders] will be no easy task."

One of the most commonly used research techniques to determine whether something (a personality trait or skill) is determined more by nature (i.e. genetic factors) or nurture (i.e. environmental factors) is the twin study.  Identical twins (monozygotic twins, MZ, i.e. twins developing from a single fertilized egg) share 100% of their genes and fraternal (dizygotic, DZ, i.e. twins developing from two separate eggs fertilized by two different sperm) twins only share about 50% of their genes.  By comparing the similarities between MZ and DZ twins in personality traits like intelligence or skills such as leadership, researchers can distinguish between genetic and environmental influences. So, if a trait is highly heritable, identical twins will be far more similar than fraternal twins. If environmental factors are the main driver, the similarity will be closer for both types of twins.

There have been a few twin studies on leadership, most of which suggest that genetic factors account for between 25% to 50% of what constitutes leadership.  Most of these studies have used either self-reported measures of leadership traits or something called leadership occupancy (whether someone is in a leadership role in an organization) as a surrogate for possessing traits that would make someone a good leader.  The journal The Leadership Quarterly dedicated an entire issue called "The Biology of Leadership" in 2012, which reviewed most of these studies.

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler were part of a team of investigators that conducted the study I mentioned at the beginning of this post ("Born to lead? A twin design and genetic association study of leadership role occupancy").  I've talked about these two scientists in the past (see, for example, "Peer Pressure", "Happy is contagious", and most recently, "Blueprint").  What distinguishes this study from all of the previous ones was that the investigators also had access to a large repository of genetic markers from two separate longitudinal studies.  The first was the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), which started in 1994 and included demographic data, survey responses on a variety of different parameters, and genetic markers for just over 2,500 study participants.  The second was the famous Framingham Heart Study that began in 1948 and included data from just over 3,500 study participants.

The correlation coefficient for leadership occupancy was 0.357 for MZ twins and 0.033 for DZ twins (a statistically significant difference).  Controlling for demographic factors such as gender and age, genetic factors explained 24% of the difference between individuals in leadership occupancy.  Importantly, the rs490 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) on the CHRNB3 gene (which encodes for a specific kind of brain receptor, called the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor) was associated with leadership occupancy.  Specifically, having one more rs4950 A allele (instead of a G allele) increased the odds of being in a leadership role by 50 percent!  Using data from the Framingham Heart Study, the investigators once again found that having one more rs4950 A allele (instead of a G allele) increased the odds of occupying a leadership role by approximately 25%, which was again statistically significant.

Unfortunately, these investigators were unable to explain how having one more rs4950 A allele resulted in a greater likelihood of occupying a leadership role.  They did discuss what is currently known about the neuroscience of the CHRNB3 gene and nicotinic acetylcholine receptors.  In other words, the results of this study are far from complete.  Given that these specific receptors have been shown in other studies to modulate both personality and psychological behavior, the findings of the present study are very interesting.

I've come across a concept known as the Diathesis-Stress Model in psychology.  The term "diathesis" comes from the Greek word for "disposition".  The Diathesis-Stress Model suggests that mental health disorders arise from the interaction of an underlying disposition (diathesis) and external stressors. An individual may have a predisposition to a disorder, but it’s the combination of this vulnerability and adverse life events that triggers its manifestation.  I think a similar model applies to leadership.  There are probably certain genetic factors that predispose individuals to become leaders, but it is the combination of those genetic factors and environmental factors, such as experience, training, and education that play an important role as well.  

I still strongly believe in the concept that "Leaders are made, not born."  I have to admit though, the studies mentioned above certainly lead to a number of additional questions.  So, I asked that exact question to the AI platform ChatGPT, which answered, "Leaders are both born and made...Natural traits may influence the path, but leadership is ultimately a skill set — and skills can be developed."

You centralize so that you can decentralize...

As I explained in a post a few years ago called "The bureaucracy paradox", the American sociologist Charles Perrow famously wrote "...the more bureaucratized an organization, the more possibilities there are for decentralized decision-making...You decentralize, we might say, by centralizing."  When I first came across this statement in Perrow's 1977 article "The bureaucratic paradox: The efficient organization centralizes in order to decentralize", I have to admit that I was thoroughly confused.  In many ways, the traditional bureaucratic organization is hierarchical in nature, and decisions are made by a relatively small number of individuals who work at the top of the hierarchy.  Bureaucracy, as a word, is almost synonymous with centralization.  However, as I've experienced working in different organizations with different organizational structures and cultures, I have come to appreciate how much truth resides in Perrow's statement.

According to most authorities on the subject, when it comes to organizational structure, centralization versus decentralization refers to the locus of decision-making authority.  In a centralized organizational structure, individuals who lie at the periphery (or, as some describe it, the bottom of the hierarchy) of the organization send information to those individuals in the center (the top of the hierarchy), where a decision is made and sent back to the individuals at the periphery to execute.  Decentralization flips this around, giving individuals who lie at the periphery (the bottom of the hierarchy) the authority (and accountability) to make decisions.  Retired U.S. Navy Captain David Marquet refers to centralization as  "pushing information to authority" and decentralization as "pushing authority to information".

As with just about everything, there are certain advantages and disadvantages to centralization versus decentralization.  Proponents of centralization, as an example, will often argue that it makes the process of gathering and processing information much more efficient.  Centralization also circumvents coordination problems and organizational politics ("Not everyone is going to be happy with the decision, and that's perfectly okay").  Conversely, proponents of decentralization argue that by giving individuals at the periphery (to use the description above) the opportunity to provide input and take part in decisions increases engagement, builds trust and cooperation, and ultimately increases the chance of a successful implementation, particularly one that may be controversial.

Hala Altamimi, Qiaozhen Liu, and Benedict Jimenez studied (see "Not too much, not too little: Centralization, decentralization, and organizational change") whether the degree of centralization influences the implementation of four different types of organizational change in their national study of U.S. city governments who were confronted with a severe budgetary crisis in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007-2009.  These local governments responded to the crisis by significantly changing the organizational structure (reorganization), contracting out services previously provided by the local government (service contracting, or outsourcing), adopting new technology (technology adoption), or instituting performance management with defined metrics (performance information).  

These investigators found that neither full centralization nor full decentralization works well, particularly during a period of crisis or time of constraint.  Instead, those organizational structures that have elements of both may perform the best, particularly when organizational change is required.  Just as important was the finding that context matters.  When organizational change is likely to be disruptive (reorganization or technology adoption), an organizational structure that leans toward moderate centralization is likely to be preferred.  Conversely, if organizational change is less disruptive in nature (service contracting or performance information), an organizational structure that leans toward moderate decentralization is preferred.  

Apparently, this contingent approach to the centralization/decentralization debate has been known for quite some time.  Henri Fayol argued in 1949 that, "...the question of centralization or decentralization is simply a matter of proportion, it is a matter of finding the optimum degree for the particular concern."  Others have labeled this contingent approach, "decentralized centralization" or even a networked approach (see also, Stanley McChrystal's "Team of Teams" approach).

The best analogy may be historical.  From 1781 to 1789, the United States were governed by the Articles of Confederation, a truly decentralized model in which the 13 states (at the time) existed as more or less distinct entities with very little in the way of central oversight.  The U.S. Constitution divided power between a federal (or central) government and the state governments.  While the state governments still had significant autonomy, they were now also subject to a more powerful central government.  The Constitution gave certain "powers" (authority) to the federal government, such as authority over national defense, currency, interstate commerce, etc.  In this way, the U.S. Constitution decentralizes governance across today's 50 states, allowing decisions to be made at the local level, while at the same time, centralizing authority in the federal government to maintain unity, enforce rights, and manage national priorities.  In other words, "decentralized centralization".

I think we've covered enough for today.  I am still trying to wrap my brain around this topic, so I will likely keep coming back to it in future posts.  For now, I think the take-home message is paraphrasing what Perrow said, "You centralize so that you can decentralize..."

U.S. high school reading and math scores at an all-time low

There has been a lot of attention in the recent press on the recent report that U.S. high school seniors' reading and math scores have dropped to their lowest level in several decades.  These reports also come in the wake of a report suggesting that eighth grade science scores have also declined to their lowest levels.  The new report is known as the Nation's Report Card, and the 2024 results were released this past week by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Department of Education (incidentally, both the NCES and Department of Education underwent significant budget cuts and massive staff reductions imposed by the current U.S. President's administration earlier this year).  

Average scores were lower across all three assessments (science, reading, and math) compared to the previous test scores from 2019.  Thirty-one percent of 8th graders performed at or above what is considered a proficient level.  Twenty-two percent of 12th graders performed at or above a proficient level in mathematics, while thirty-five percent of 12th graders performed at or above a proficient level in reading.

I know that my college prep mathematics sequence required me to take both Algebra 2 and Geometry during my sophomore year of high school, which allowed me to take Calculus during my senior year.  I also know that schools are pushing Algebra 1 earlier and earlier, at least compared to when I took Algebra 1 during 9th grade.  From what I hear, schools today are starting Algebra 1 as early as the 7th grade.  I do wonder if we are pushing Algebra at the expense of other basic mathematics skills.  

The Wall Street Journal published an article and accompanying editorial on September 9th entitled "Another K-12 Education Disaster" and wrote that "a third of high-school seniors lack basic reading skills and nearly half can't do rudimentary math."  They cite multiple factors, including the widespread school shutdowns that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic.  While that may be a factor, the data suggest that the trends in decrease in math and reading scores started even prior to the pandemic.  They also suggest, "An emphasis on 'equity' has led some school districts to adopt no-grading and no-homework policies in lower grades.  Schools have reduced graduation requirements and inflated grades across the board.  The result: High-school graduation rates have increased...even as students are less prepared for college."  Other experts raise concerns about absenteeism, teacher turnover, and the impact of social media, as well as school violence and the mental health crisis.

It's hard to avoid politics when it comes to this important issue, and the WSJ editorial staff certainly brought politics into the discussion in their opinion piece.  I honestly don't know the right answer, and I suspect that there is some element of truth to the arguments being made by both sides of the political debate.  What is clear to me (and not political) is that whatever we've been doing in the last decade or so just isn't working.  Education is too important an issue - we don't just need to get a "passing grade" with our education system (and we aren't), we should be trying to get straight A's!

The Luck Factor Part II

Last time (see "The Luck Factor - Part I"), I talked about Max Gunther's book,  The Luck Factor.  Today I want to review what Richard Wiseman has to say about luck in his more recent book of the same name.  Wiseman conducted his research over 10 years and started by placing advertisements in national newspapers and magazines, asking for people who considered themselves lucky or unlucky to contact him.  Over 400 individuals from virtually all walks of life responded to his inquiry.  Over the years, Wiseman has interviewed these volunteers and asked them to keep personal diaries, complete questionnaires and personality assessments, and participate in laboratory experiments.

Wiseman writes in an article based on his research (and book), "Luck is not a magical ability or the result of random chance.  Nor are people born lucky or unlucky.  Instead, although lucky and unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behavior are responsible for much of their fortune."

Wiseman, like Gunther, suggests that so-called "lucky individuals" create their own good fortune via four basic principles.  He writes, "They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good."  

While similar to Gunther's five key characteristics, Wiseman differs with Gunther on a few items.  Let's take a closer look.

1. Creating and noticing chance opportunities

Wiseman, like Gunther, found that lucky individuals tend to create and act upon chance opportunities (sounds very similar to Gunther's "Spiderweb Structure" and "Audentes Fortunate Juvat").  Wiseman conducted a simple experiment using both his lucky and unlucky volunteers.  He asked them to look through a newspaper and count the number of photographs that were inside.  On average, the unlucky volunteers took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky volunteers only took a few seconds to complete the task.  Why?  Wiseman had also placed a message on the second page of the newspaper that said, "Stop counting - there are 43 photographs in this newspaper."  The message should have been easy to spot, as it took up half of the page and was written in type that was over 2 inches tall!  Most of the unlucky people just didn't see the message, while the majority of the lucky people did see the message.

As an additional test, Wiseman placed a second, similarly large, message about half way through the newspaper that said, "Stop counting, tell the experiment you have seen this and win $250."  Again, most of the unlucky people missed the message, while most of the lucky people earned themselves $250.

When Wiseman conducted personality tests on his volunteers, he found that unlucky people, as a group, tend to be more anxious and tense than the lucky people.  Further experiments conducted in his laboratory suggested that the unlucky people were too focused on one task (counting the photographs) to notice the unexpected message (Is anyone else thinking of the famous "Invisible Gorilla"?).  Lucky people are more relaxed and open to opportunities, such that they are more likely to "see what is there rather than just what they are looking for..."

2.  Making lucky decisions by listening to their intuition

Wiseman's point here sounds a lot like Gunther's "Hunching Skill".  Again, lucky people are more likely to take advantage of unexpected opportunities, even if it requires taking on some additional risk.  They act upon their hunches, which creates good fortune.

3. Creating self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations

 Here is where I think Wiseman differs slightly from Gunther.  Remember that Gunther talked about the "pessimism paradox" and how lucky people are always expecting and preparing for the worst.  Wiseman suggests that lucky people take a more optimistic or positive attitude.  He suggests, "Lucky people tend to imagine spontaneously how the bad luck they encounter could have been worse and, in doing so, they feel much better about themselves and their lives."  

He mentions research that suggests that Bronze medal winners in the Olympics are typically happier with the result than those who win Silver medals.  Why?  The Bronze medal winners focus on the fact that if they had performed slightly worse, they wouldn't have won a medal, while the Silver medal winners focus on the fact that if they had just performed a little better, they might have won a Gold medal instead. 

4. Adopting a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good

I found Wiseman's point here to be very similar to Gunther's "Ratchet effect".  Remember that "a ratchet is a device that preserves gains."  Lucky individuals seem to know how to preserve their gains and minimize their losses, even when things aren't necessarily going their way.

Overall, both Wiseman's and Gunther's research emphasizes to me, once again, that we can create our own luck.  Just to drive this home, towards the end of Wiseman's study, he actually enrolled the unlucky volunteers into "luck school" which taught them the four characteristics that he found in his lucky volunteers mentioned above.  Eighty percent of people who participated in "luck school" were happier, more satisfied with their lives, and perhaps most important of all, luckier.  Unlucky people had become lucky ones!

The Luck Factor Part I

I've never been particularly superstitious.  Even when I was younger, I never really had what some people would call a "good luck charm".  Don't get me wrong, I've read a number of studies suggesting that "good luck charms" or common sayings like "Break a leg" or actions such as crossing one's fingers do occasionally positively impact performance (see, for example, a study by Lysann Damisch and colleagues, "Keep your fingers crossed! How superstition improves performance").  I guess that I've always felt that you create your own luck, and by "create" I don't mean using a superstitious charm, saying, or action.  

I've talked about "creating your own luck" in the past (see my posts, "It's better to be lucky than good", "Good luck is the twin of hard work", and "Lucky Breaks").  However, in today's post I wanted to focus on two books that I recently came across that talk about luck.  The first one is Max Gunther's book from 1977, The Luck Factor: Why some people are luckier than others and how you can become one of them.  The second is a little more recent and was written in 2003 by Richard Wiseman, which is also called The Luck Factor.  Both books are very similar.

Gunther suggests that there are five characteristics that distinguish people that we would call lucky from people that we would call unlucky.  All five characteristics involve an attitude toward life and the people that we encounter.  In his research, Gunther consistently finds that the lucky individuals possess all five characteristics, while those who are unlucky do not.  Here are the five characteristics:

1. The Spiderweb Structure

Gunther says, "The luckiest men and women are those who have taken the trouble to form a great many friendly contacts with other people."  "Lucky" individuals go out of their way to be friendly and talk with strangers.  They form connections with other people that create opportunities.  I am reminded of Mark Granovetter's study, "The Strength of Weak Ties".  Granovetter found that our infrequent, casual relationships ("weak ties") are often the ones that are more beneficial to us than our close, frequent relationships ("strong ties"), at least in regards to accessing new information or opportunities.  It follows then that the more acquaintances we have, the greater our opportunities!  The so-called "lucky" individuals are simply taking the most advantage of the connections that they have made to put themselves in the position to be lucky.

2. The Hunching Skill

Gunther says, "A hunch is a piece of mind stuff that feels something like knowledge but doesn't feel perfectly trustworthy...a capacity to generate accurate hunches, and then to trust them and act on them would go a long way towards producing luck."  Gunther further suggests that "lucky people...are often people who have discovered intuitively how to plumb that well of subsurface knowledge inside themselves."

3.  "Audentes Fortunate Juvat"

Gunther suggests that the common cliche, "Fortune favors the bold" is exactly right.  Lucky people know when to act on their hunches, even if it requires taking risks.  He writes, "As a group, lucky people tend to be bold people.  The most timid men and women I've met in my travels have also been...the least lucky...Boldness helps create good luck."  He adds a cautionary note that boldness isn't the same as rashness.  Lucky individuals aren't afraid to take risks, but they are careful about the risks that they do take.

4. The Ratchet Effect

Gunther says, "A ratchet is a device that preserves gains."  Lucky individuals seem to have organized their lives so that they preserve their gains and limit their losses.  Perhaps the most important aspect of Gunther's "ratchet effect" is knowing when to admit that you are making a mistake and change course.  Lucky individuals have that knack to be able to think beyond sunk costs and move forward.

5.  The Pessimism Paradox

Gunther suggests that lucky people are not generally optimistic in nature.  Instead, they lean towards the pessimistic side of the spectrum by constantly trying to prepare for the unexpected and always thinking about what can go wrong (Murphy's Law).  The lucky people expect and prepare for the worst, that way they are never surprised.  Gunther suggests, "Never enter a situation without knowing what you will do when it goes wrong."

Next time, I will cover what Richard Wiseman has to say about "creating your own luck."

Finding Joy

My very first introduction to the author C.S. Lewis, like many others I suppose, was the book, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.  I remember first hearing about the book when I was in school.  One of my classmates gave an oral report on the book.  For reasons that I can't explain, I never read the book during my childhood.  As a matter of fact, I knew nothing else about the author of the book.  Much later, actually during medical school, my wife and I went and saw Shadowlands, which was a movie about the relationship between C.S. Lewis (played by Anthony Hopkins) and American writer Joy Davidman Gresham (played by Debra Winger).  Davidman's death from cancer challenged Lewis' faith in Christianity, which was the subject of his book, A Grief Observed.  After the movie, my wife told me all about C.S. Lewis and his books about Christianity, some of which she had to read in Catholic school.

C.S. Lewis also wrote a semi-autobiographical book, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life.  While his relationship with Joy Davidman certainly influenced this book, contrary to common belief, the title actually is a reference to the poem "Surprised by Joy" by William Wordsworth.  The book is a spiritual memoir that describes Lewis' own faith journey to Christianity and covers his early life up until around 1931 (note that he met Joy Davidman Greshman in 1952).  In the book, Lewis describes his search for what the Germans call "Sehnsucht" (loosely translated as "longing, desire, or yearning"), which he chooses to call simply "joy".  Lewis writes, "Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing."  In other words, according to Lewis, there are two components to joy - pleasure or happiness (a positive emotion) and a longing or searching (an action).

I had C.S. Lewis in mind when I first read the Harvard Business Review article, "How the Busiest People Find Joy" by Leslie A. Perlow, Sari Mentser, and Salvatore J. Affinito.  They begin the article by stating, "Research suggests that to have a satisfying life, you need to regularly feel three things: achievement (recognition or a sense of accomplishment), meaningfulness (a connection to something bigger than yourself), and joy (happiness or positive emotion) in the moment."  

According to their own research, most professionals are doing very well when it comes to the first two requirements for life satisfaction (achievement and meaningfulness).  However, most professionals fall short when it comes to the third component, joy.  Importantly, the psychologist Roy Baumeister (I've posted about his research in the past - see in particular the posts about marshmallows and radishes and his work on ego depletion) published a study about a decade or so ago ("Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life") that found that there are important differences between "being happy" and "having a meaningful life".  In other words, individuals can be happy but lead a meaningless life, while other individuals can be unhappy but living a life full of meaning.  

I tend to agree with Baumeister, which is why I like the fact that Perlow, Mentser, and Affinito distinguished between achievement, meaningfulness, and joy.  However, bringing everything back full circle, I subscribe to Lewis' theory that true joy requires both a positive emotion (happiness) and an action.  In other words, we have to look for happiness, or even more often, we have to choose happiness.  According to Perlow, Mentser, and Affinito, here is what we can do to look for and choose happiness:

1. Engage with others: We know that one of the most powerful and consistent predictors of life satisfaction is having strong, meaningful relationships with others.  Perlow, Mentser, and Affinito found that shared experiences with our friends, colleagues, and family amplify joy.  In other words, doing the activities we love with people we enjoy is much better than doing those same activities alone.

2. Avoid passive pursuits: Again, consistent with most of the research that I've found on life satisfaction, Perlow, Mentser, and Affinito found that active solo pursuits (exercise, exploring hobbies, volunteering, etc) is much better than passive activities (watching television, scrolling through social media, napping, etc).  

3. Follow your passion: Consistent with my statement above (based on C.S. Lewis), we should actively search for and in some cases, even choose, happiness.  Activities that align with what we find personally rewarding are going to boost our life satisfaction, as opposed to the ones that we do because other people tell us that they are "good for us".

4. Diversify your activities: We can only get so much satisfaction and joy from a single activity.  If we spend all of our time on one activity, we are going to find that it gives us less joy than it previously did in the past (some call this the hedonic treadmill or hedonic adaptation).  As the saying goes, "variety is the spice of life".

5. Protect the time: Even if we find joy and meaning at work, we need to make sure to spend time for ourselves.  Free or leisure time is important too.  And importantly, people who experience more joy in their free time find more value and joy at work!

I've learned a lot about happiness and joy this past year.  I've found that we can choose to be happy, and in some cases, finding happiness will require effort on our part.  Once again, I will conclude with a quote.  C.S. Lewis wrote, "If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone."

The law of unintended consequences

There's an old saying that I've mentioned a few times in previous posts (see, for example, "Past is prologue").  I like Winston Churchill's version the best.  Churchill said, "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."  

It seems that the local government leaders in the Chicago suburb of Lincoln Park have forgotten their history, or at the very least, they've forgotten about the law of unintended consequences.  Apparently, 43rd Ward Alderperson Timmy Knudsen recently introduced a resolution for a privately funded pilot ("Rat Contraceptive Pilot") that will introduce non-toxic contraceptive pellets to reduce the rat population.  The pilot is being coordinated with the local government, the Chicago Bird Alliance, the Lincoln Park Zoo, the Lincoln Park Conservancy, and the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation.

Similar pilot programs in other suburbs of Chicago (Wicker Park and Bucktown) have been reasonably successful, at least so far.  The contraceptive agent is cottonseed oil, which renders both male and female rats infertile.  Importantly, cottonseed oil is not toxic to other species, at least based on our current knowledge.  Previous attempts to control the rat population have used poisonous substances that have killed other species as collateral damage or as an unintended consequence.  In Lincoln Park's case, a species of horned owl was the collateral damage.

It's virtually guaranteed that when some change is introduced into a complex system, there will be an unanticipated or unintended consequence.  The American sociologist Robert K. Merton conducted the first and perhaps most complete analysis of the law of unintended consequences in a 1936 paper entitled "The unanticipated consequences of purposive social action".  He identified five potential causes of unintended consequences:

1. Ignorance of how complex systems actually work

2. Errors of analysis or failure to use Bayes theorem (not updating our beliefs in light of new information)

3. Focusing on short-term gains while forgetting long-term consequences (perhaps willful ignorance, in which an individual chooses to ignore the unintended effects because he or she desires the intended effects so much) - Merton called this "imperious immediacy of interest"

4. The requirement for or prohibition of certain actions

5. Creation of self-defeating prophecies 

Merton says, "Most unintended consequences are just unanticipated consequences", largely due to ignorance or errors of analysis (the first two causes above).  One wonders whether the local authorities could have predicted the risk of an alternative species, such as the horned owl, ingesting rat toxin and dying as a result.  Perhaps they were so focused on the short-term gain of reducing the rat population, that they neglected or even forgot the potential long-term consequences of killing other species (Merton's third cause above).

I can't help but wonder what the unintended consequences that cottonseed oil will have on the local community.  It seems like it would be safe to place rat pellets containing that substance in areas where rats congregate.  But, you just never know.  I can't help but think of the case I described in my post "Is this another April Fool's joke?" of mice armed with Tylenol parachuting into the jungles of Guam in an attempt to control the Brown Tree Snake population.  The mere fact that the Brown Tree Snake, a non-native species, is even on the island of Guam is yet another unintended consequence.

Health care is the nation's top employer!

The journalists Lydia DePillis and Christine Zhang wrote an article for The New York Times last month that I found very interesting ("How Health Care Remade the U.S. Economy").  I actually saw the article appear on my daily newsfeed when the article had first appeared and marked it to be read later, and I finally was able to read it.  The main theme of the article is that the health care industry has become America's top employer!

According to DePillis and Zhang, health care has been responsible for about one-third of the growth in employment in the past year and has more than replaced the loss of jobs in the manufacturing and retail sectors (see also the working paper by the health economists, Joshua Gottlieb, Neale Mahoney, Kevin Rinz, and Victoria Udalova "The Rise of Healthcare Jobs").  Today, health care workers account for approximately 13% of the total workforce in the United States, up from 9% in 2000.  Certainly the changing demographics in the U.S. have played a role here - as Americans age, they will require more care.  However, these trends could change in the next few years.  Given the recent cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, health care organizations are looking for ways to cut costs, and cutting labor costs could be one lever to pull.

DePillis and Zhang cite three factors at play here.  First, more Americans are getting access to care as the uninsured rate declined significantly following passage of the Affordable Care Act.  Second, as access to care has increased, people are using more of it.  Again, the aging U.S. population is a factor here, as chronic conditions (that require more care) increase with age.  Third, Americans are spending more on health care because they have more money to spend.  Americans now spend more on health care than either groceries or housing.

What I found most interesting about the article was the fact that the health care industry is the biggest employer in 38 out of 50 states!  Just look at the graphic below, again from data obtained by DePillis and Zhang and published in The New York Times:

The article also mentions the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the U.S. healthcare workforce (I've mentioned this a few times in recent posts, see "Will we get replaced by AI?").  What's also mentioned is the fact that health care is not efficient.  Many times, but not always, efficiency is equated, rightly or wrongly, with being smaller.  It will be interesting to monitor these health care workforce trends as artificial intelligence, the aging U.S. population, and the looming cuts to Medicare and Medicaid all converge at the same time.

Take a break...

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a book that the American entrepreneur, author, ultramarathoner, former rapper (under the name "Jesse Jaymes"), and co-owner of the professional basketball team Atlanta Hawks Jesse Itzler wrote about his month-long experience of living and training with former Navy SEAL David Goggins.  The book is called Living with a SEAL: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet.  For his next project, Itzler decided to work on his spiritual health by living in a monastery and going "off the grid" for a month (see Living with the Monks).  Itzler apparently gave up all access to social media and his smart phone during his time with the monks.

While I haven't read Itzler's latest book about giving up access to information technology, I have read a recent study (see "Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being") published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus journal.  An investigative team conducted a study in which they blocked all mobile internet access for a two-week period.  They used a cross-over design in which study participants served as their own controls, i.e. they participated for a full two-week period without mobile Internet access as well as an additional two-week period with full mobile Internet access.  During the intervention period (no mobile Internet access), study participants were able to call and/or text message on their smartphone and use the Internet via desktop computers.

Simply blocking access on the study participants' smartphones significantly improved objective measures of mental health and the ability to sustain attention, as well as subjective measures of well-being.  These effects occurred because blocking mobile Internet access increased social connection, feelings of self-control, and sleep.  As participants spent less time on the Internet, they spent more time in the "offline world" (socializing in person, exercising, being in nature, pursuing a hobby, or reading a book) and less time in the "digital world".  The investigators emphasized, "the change in objectively measured sustained attention ability is about the same magnitude as 10 years of age-related decline and about a quarter of the difference between healthy adults and those with ADHD."  Just as powerful, the observed improvements in symptoms of depression (one of the objective measures of well-being) was larger than what would be typical for individuals on anti-depressant medications and similar to the improvement observed with cognitive behavioral therapy.

I can remember a time when I went on vacation and somehow lost access to the Internet and email on my smartphone.  There was some glitch with our mobile service provider, which I couldn't address until we got back home.  I have to say that while losing mobile Internet access was certainly a change, I actually didn't miss it!  I spent more quality time on vacation, which certainly improved my subjective well-being.

Studies have suggested that more than 90% of American adults own a smartphone, and the average user spends up to 4.6 hours per day on their device.  Just as important, survey data suggests that half of all smartphone users in America worry that they use their device too much.  I've already mentioned in previous posts that experts worry that smartphones "hijack our minds" or that they've "destroyed a generation" (see in particular my posts, "Are smartphones making us dumb?" and "Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid...").  

Unfortunately, not all of us have the ability to put work aside and spend a month in a monastery like Jess Itzler did for his book.  However, all of us do have the ability to forego using our smartphones as frequently as we do currently.  Perhaps we could set a certain amount of time aside every day in which we refrain from using our smartphones (there is a way to do just that)?  I've already talked about how I deleted the Facebook and Twitter/X apps on my smartphone and deleted my accounts to both sites (see my post "Liberation").  I can already tell a difference.  Regardless of how we do it, the data strongly suggests that spending less time on our mobile Internet devices will make all of us feel a lot better!