countingyams

[countingyams]

How to ask for what you want

by Lucy Kellaway on 5th Feb 2017

Link: https://www.ft.com/content/2053f906-e98d-11e6-893c-082c54a7f539

I know a woman who can get people to do whatever she wants. She can make busy executives give her their evenings, their thoughts and their money. On various occasions she has persuaded me to do things for her, just as she has enlisted thousands of others.

I ran into her the other day and asked what her secret was. “It is not hard,” she said. “I just say please and thank you.” Actually it is not quite as simple as that. Most people know how to say please and thank you — or think they do. Almost everyone was taught that before they went to primary school. But hardly anyone has been taught how to do it properly. 

Consider the following perfectly polite email I received recently from a man I know slightly. It began: “This year we are partnering with XXX to launch the second annual YYY conference. I know you are busy but we would love you to host a session on women in business on the Saturday.” 

It then went on at length about the theme of the year and offered a link to a video of the previous year’s event. “Do let me know if that is feasible,” it ended. It was not feasible. Why would I give up a Saturday on the basis of watching a clip of a similar conference a year earlier? The length of the email made me feel restive and inclined to hit the delete button. To be reminded that I am busy merely provided an excuse to decline. 

Now consider this message from my other acquaintance. Its subject line read: “If only you would . . . ” and the email continued “ . . . join our panel on xxx. We have a lot of clever but worthy people talking, and we need your genius to liven it up. Please say yes.”

What this does is cut to the chase — and the chase is flattery. The only truly effective way of saying please is to butter people up. There is no danger of ever laying it on too thick. There is no level at which flattery stops working, according to a study by Jennifer Chatman of the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to being flattering, the perfect please has to make you feel not only wanted, but also needed. I read the email and said yes at once. I knew how manipulative it was, but I could not help myself. 

Getting thank you right is just as easy, though just as uncommon. Consider the following failed attempt that landed in my inbox recently: “Thank you for talking at our function last week and for giving up your time. The feedback was excellent and we hope you enjoyed it.” This was polite and professional. Yet it quite failed to do its job. For a start it was miles too slow — an emailed thank you should arrive within hours, not the following week. 

Equally, to be thanked for your time is singularly ungratifying. Time takes no skill to give. To say the feedback was excellent was too vague to be convincing. And rather than ask if I had enjoyed it, it would have been better to attest how much they had enjoyed having me. In rejecting this message, I felt the spirit of my mother. She was a fiend with the thank-you letter. 

Every year on December 27 she sat us children down and made us write letters to everyone who had given us anything for Christmas. We had to specify what the present was, claim to be delighted with it, and (this was hardest) we had to say why. When we were done with thanking, we had to keep writing until half way down the second page before signing off. 

Three of my mother’s four principles apply to the thank-you email. You thank specifically for the thing. You say why you liked it — and you must thank promptly. The only difference for me now is that I no longer have to rattle on for a page and a half. Indeed, the shorter the better. 

 And this is exactly what my persuasive acquaintance did. “Extraoooordinary”, said the subject line of the thank-you email that was waiting in my inbox when I awoke the next day. “Thank you for bringing the evening to life and for scorching wit and sense. You are our own Tina Fey.” 

 Actually, I had performed indifferently. I knew that — and so did she. We both understood the game she was playing. But no matter. The next time she asks me to do something, I will comply. 

[countingyams]

This year, I resolve to waste time well

By Lydia Lum for The Sunday Times on January 01, 2017

New Year's resolutions can make for hard reading, especially in a year with sputtering economic growth and spiralling geopolitical risk, not to mention cost cutting and belt tightening, all of which can suck the cheer out of a festive season. Pledges to eat less, drink less and spend less just add to the gloom.

So I have decided to focus not on what I want to cut back on, but on how I want to enlarge my life.

This is no small step for a careful saver like me who has for decades embraced the Singapore ethic of squirrelling money away for a rainy day and, along with it, the modern cult of personal productivity which spurred me to purge my life of time-wasting activities such as watching television and reading storybooks.

Both seemed like indulgences I could ill afford. Instead, I have for years read almost exclusively non-fiction, the sort I need for work or for self-improvement.

Such a regimen trains you for a life that can seem awfully purposeful. But if adhered to too strictly, it fails to free you and instead tethers you to a powerful vacuum cleaner that sucks the joy out of living and leaves you wondering what you are storing away time and money for.

So this year, I resolve to do the opposite and think hard about how to waste time.

I use the word "waste" intentionally, a verb the dictionary says means to "use or expend carelessly, extravagantly or to no purpose". Its synonyms include "squander" and "fritter away".

I wish to devote this column precisely to extravagance and those aspects of life that seem to serve no purpose, at least not any that we can touch or tote up in our bank accounts or lists of achievements.

Many years ago, when I was still in school and had the time and space to wander around those magical places called libraries, linger among the shelves and delve into the books I chanced upon, I stumbled across some lines of poetry about buying "hyacinths for the soul". For some reason, that phrase enchanted me and I never forgot it, perhaps because it reminded me of that time long ago and those stories I read - stories from around the world about people and places and happenings that piqued my curiosity, fired my imagination and, yes, fed my soul.

The phrase likely comes from the work of a 13th-century Persian poet named Muslihuddin Sadi, who is said to have written these lines:

If, of thy mortal goods, thou art bereft,

And from thy slender store two loaves

alone to thee are left,

Sell one and from the dole,

Buy hyacinths to feed the soul.

Last year, I started reading fiction again and was transported to worlds I would never be able to travel to physically, no matter how big my budget. I was moved to tears by Madeleine Thein's novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, on China's cultural revolution, and thrilled that Tan Twan Eng's Garden Of Evening Mists taught me some of the history of a place I love - Cameron Highlands. I found myself wanting to tell my family and friends about what I learnt from reading those books. I cannot wait to discover more literary gems, especially those by Asian writers.

In a lecture he delivered in October 2015 on the future of reading and libraries, British writer Neil Gaiman spoke about visiting China in 2007 for the first-ever Communist Party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention. He wondered why science fiction, which had been disapproved of for a long time, was now allowed.

He asked a top official and related what this official said in reply: "It's simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine.

"So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found out that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys and girls.

"Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you have never been. Once you have visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: Discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leaving them better, leaving them different."

American writer Maya Angelou stopped talking for five years after being raped at age seven. "In those five years," she said in an interview, "I read every book in the black school library. I read all the books I could get from the white school library. I memorised Shakespeare, whole plays, 50 sonnets. I memorised Edgar Allan Poe, all the poetry, never having heard it, I memorised it. I had Longfellow, I had Guy de Maupassant, I had Balzac, Rudyard Kipling. When I decided to speak, I had a lot to say, and many ways in which to say what I had to say... And I was able to draw from human thought, human disappointments and triumphs, enough to triumph myself."

Fiction, it seems, is a good waste of time.

What of music?

Just over a year ago, I was speaking to two friends whose seven-year-old daughter is now learning the cello. I mentioned cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the three of us discovered that some 20 years ago, when we had not known each other, we had gone separately to watch him play with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra at the Victoria Concert Hall. What was amazing was how well we all remembered that concert - actually I had only managed to get tickets to the lunchtime rehearsal - and how moved we had been by his playing. I had gone with a friend who is a classical music aficionado and I remember turning to him at the end of the Elgar Concerto and swallowing my words when I saw tears rolling silently down his face.

A couple of months ago, over tea in the office, a colleague surprised me by describing in vivid detail a trip he had made to Amsterdam, from Cambridge where he had then been studying, to catch a performance by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. It was clearly an experience he would cherish for the rest of his life. Since coming back to Singapore and starting work, though, he has had little time for concerts, he said. That made me sad because he spoke with such depth of feeling about the beauty of a Mahler symphony.

Why listen to classical music, or any other kind of music for that matter, especially if you have no plans to make a career of it?

Musician Andrew Balio, founder of Future Symphony Institute, a think-tank dedicated to classical music, believes classical music "opens for us a door into a space that exists beyond our physical world, and what we hear moving in the music through that space is us. The symphony takes us on a journey through the secretive shadows and the uncertain vistas of our human condition. It touches those things of value within us, and it invites them to witness the miracle of transubstantiation wherein the dross of our daily existence, however trivial or tragic, is changed into the possibility of salvation".

Mr Balio also reflects on why he thinks classical music audiences are ageing: "Obviously, our elders come to concerts not because they hope the music will make them better at maths or more successful in their careers. There is no use to which they plan to put the music they come to hear, cleverly plying it to realise their five- or 10-year plans.

"I think if we asked them, we would find that classical music for them is only about beauty. I think they would sympathise with John Ruskin, who said, 'Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.'

"And maybe this is the real reason that audiences for classical music are aging: That it takes us so much longer to shake off the utilitarian mindset that pervades our modern world, so well-rooted it has become in our unexamined ways of thinking and being."

What would you like to waste time on this year? I leave you with that question and wish you a Happy New Year.

[countingyams]

Parenting dilemmas in the digital age

By Tee Hun Ching for The Straits Times, 17 October 2016

The wave of sadness struck out of the blue. There I was, chatting with my son as I tucked him in for the night when his face suddenly crumpled.

"It's very hard, you know," he moaned.

"What is?" I asked, alarmed.

I managed to coax the sob story from him eventually.

The gist: He is one of only a few in his class - if not the only one - who has yet to play Pokemon Go.

That is just the tip of the iceberg.

At the ripe old age of nine, my son belongs to a rare breed of modern kids that has never played Minecraft; thinks Wii, Xbox and Playstation are exotic terms instead of household fixtures; and does not get a regular game fix on a smartphone or tablet.

"Whenever my friends talk about these things and I try to join in, they will say, 'Go away lah! You don't even play, what do you know?" he said between sniffles. "They say I'm lame."

Then the dam broke.

As I held my first-born close, I quickly diagnosed the problem: peer pressure. From what I gathered, the cool kids in his class tend to be the early adopters, boys who are always the first with the latest toys, games and gadgets.

Then I thought: "This is a conversation I wasn't expecting to have so soon."

I don't remember having any inkling of peer pressure till I was in secondary school. That was when I grew conscious of what separated the cool from the uncool, the haves from the have-nots.

I was full of admiration for those girls who were everything that I wasn't: athletic, gregarious, self-possessed.

I envied, too, those who seemed to have everything that I didn't: a ride to school every day in their parents' cars; branded sneakers for school sports activities; and holidays that entailed plane rides.

Now, what were once luxuries to me are staples to my two kids.

But my son, who gets driven to and from school daily, owned his first pair of Nike trainers at age seven and gets to fly somewhere for a vacation at least once a year, is feeling the angst over new benchmarks for what is cool.

Among his generation of digital natives, he is probably an anomaly, maybe even an outcast.

While we are hardly the gadget Gestapo, my husband and I do strive to keep our kids on a lean tech diet. From the start, we decided to play it safe by limiting their exposure to electronic devices.

Our rationale is: Why encourage a practice or habit with potential ill effects that you could have trouble curbing or killing later on?

Better, we thought, to put the controls in place first and slowly relax the reins when they show themselves mature enough to handle the freedom.

So our kids learnt early on that a mobile phone is neither a plaything nor a nanny, and screen time is not an entitlement but a privilege to be granted solely at our discretion.

When we are out and there is time to kill, say, before our food orders arrive, we ignore the grouses and hand out pens and paper for doodling or a few rounds of Hangman instead of passing them our phones.

Mobile game sessions - at most thrice a week capped at 15 minutes each time - have to be earned through good behaviour, such as being kind to each other or completing their homework on time without being nagged.

Now and then, my son and his six-year-old sister would ask to download certain games they hear their friends talk about.

I don't insist that these offer educational value but I will vet the content for violence, racy images and other undesirable elements.

As they grow older and their demands louder, I have had to find constructive ways to slake their thirst for a tech fix.

About once a week, I allow them up to half an hour on the laptop. They would sit next to me as I work, tapping out their latest story, Googling an interesting place or animal species they read about or viewing clip art images of something they wish to draw.

I say all these not with the smugness of someone who has expertly nailed the sweet spot between her children's online wants and offline needs, but with immense relief at somehow having stumbled upon an approach that seems to work for now.

Am I laying the foundation for a rich life beyond a small screen with these restrictions or crippling their prospects in the brave new world where technology rules?

How do I balance their desire to fit in, with the need to instil the right values, especially when they grow older and social media beckons?

I have few answers.

Gen X parents in, or approaching, their 40s like myself are in a unique position.

As Allison Slater Tate wrote in The Washington Post a few years ago, we are the last of the Mohicans - the last to straddle a life experience pre- and post-Internet.

Our generation "had the last of the truly low-tech childhoods, and now we are among the first of the truly high-tech parents", she pointed out.

This middle place puts us in a dilemma. We know it is possible to enjoy a gadget-free childhood, yet we also realise it is impractical to raise digital celibates today, especially when we can't tear ourselves from our own devices.

There is no precedent for parenting in the IT age, so my husband and I have chosen to err on the side of caution. Yes, at the expense of my son's street cred.

He missed out on Minecraft when his friends went ape over it two years ago because I didn't believe in paying for online games.

By the time I thought we could maybe give the virtual Lego-esque game a shot after reading about its possible benefits, the craze had passed, to my relief.

Pokemon Go, which took augmented reality mainstream, was another technological leap I was not ready for.

The premise of the game - essentially wandering around to catch virtual creatures - sounded silly to me.

Inconsiderate gamers didn't help its case either. Much of the initial Pokemon Go-related news I read involved players who made a nuisance of themselves or, worse, put others at risk as they went in hot pursuit of coveted critters.

After my son broke down, I read up on the game and discovered there were some health and social benefits to be reaped when played within safe parameters.

People were chalking up more exercise outdoors and clocking more family bonding time when they went hunting for the pocket monsters together.

"Okay, we can do this," I told my son the next day. "But there are rules, as always."

I will download the app if he works hard for his year-end exams. Even then, he can play only if he is accompanied by me or his father, and only within safe confines where there is no traffic. He has to stop the instant we say so.

That teary bedside chat took place two months ago. Since then, the Pokemon Go fever seems to have cooled. I'm prepared to honour my word, but I suspect the goalposts for this elusive, capricious thing called "cool" have moved yet again.

They will keep moving as my children learn to find their niche in life, just as I did.

If nothing else, I hope my son remembers our conversation that night went far beyond Pokemon: Just because all your friends are doing something doesn't mean it's right. But doing the right thing is always cool, even if your cool friends don't think so.

And no matter what changes technology brings, smart, funny and kind people will never go out of style.

Tee Hun Ching, a former editor and copy editor with The Straits Times, is now a freelance journalist.

[countingyams]

In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”... ... Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not “normal.” We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness,” striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners.

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"... The temptation to pretend is always great. People are looking to you to guide them. Shouldn’t you have it all together? Our tendency is to feign perfection for the sake of reputation and for fear of rejection... ... We are chronically sick people, you and I, but we have a great healer who offers grace. Let’s receive it and give it to others. Let’s be a safe place for the sick to find healing."

[countingyams]

"The core problem with working longer hours is that time is a finite resource. Energy is a different story. Defined in physics as the capacity to work, energy comes from four main wellsprings in human beings: the body, emotions, mind, and spirit. In each, energy can be systematically expanded and regularly renewed by establishing specific rituals—behaviors that are intentionally practiced and precisely scheduled, with the goal of making them unconscious and automatic as quickly as possible."

[countingyams]

Didn't realise Joseph Prince's teachings had made it across the seas to the States. Obviously, I've not been keeping up to date with the "latest trends"...

[countingyams]

" What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life."

[countingyams]

"Even those suffering from so-called empathy deficit disorders like psychopathy and narcissism appear to be capable of empathy when they want to feel it. Research conducted by one of us, William A. Cunningham, along with the psychologist Nathan Arbuckle, found that when dividing money between themselves and others, people with psychopathic tendencies were more charitable when they believed that the others were part of their in-group. Psychopaths and narcissists are able to feel empathy; it’s just that they don’t typically want to."

[countingyams]

" 'All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story or tell a story about them,' said the writer Isak Dinesen. When loss is a story, there is no right or wrong way to grieve. There is no pressure to move on. There is no shame in intensity or duration. Sadness, regret, confusion, yearning and all the experiences of grief become part of the narrative of love for the one who died."

[countingyams]

Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self.

[countingyams]

We constantly interrupt our experiences to make a record of them.

[countingyams]

A civilization that speaks in smarm is a civilization that has lost its ability to talk about purposes at all. It is a civilization that says, ‘Don’t Be Evil,’ rather than making sure it does not do evil.”

[countingyams]

The results also underscore how infrequently exercise is considered or studied as a medical intervention, Dr. Ioannidis said. “Only 5 percent” of the available and relevant experiments in his new analysis involved exercise. “We need far more information” about how exercise compares, head to head, with drugs in the treatment of many conditions, he said, as well as what types and amounts of exercise confer the most benefit and whether there are side effects, such as injuries. Ideally, he said, pharmaceutical companies would set aside a tiny fraction of their profits for such studies.

[countingyams]

I have learned from experience that the most effective executives realize that doing nothing is good for their mental health. They can take a step back and consciously unplug themselves from the compulsion to always keep busy, the habit of shielding themselves from certain feelings, and the tensions of trying to manipulate their experience before even fully acknowledging what that experience is. Turning down the volume on life can be extremely beneficial and brings them to regions of the mind that they are otherwise busily avoiding.

[countingyams]

The human body is less well understood than we think.

... Open up a human body, and you will be very surprised by what you see. Nothing is as perfectly clean and clear as anatomical illustrations suggest. The body is murky. Muscles don’t neatly separate for you in order to display their various parts. What lies beneath the chiseled beauty that is a six-pack, to cite one example, is wet and messy.