Inspirational Music and Movies

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I love inspirational music, movies, speeches, stories. Who wouldn’t want to be more inspired to feel more, do more, love more, dream more?

I recently came across the YouTube video of We Are The World, the #2 most popular music single of all-time in the United States. I had never heard of it, but apparently it was a music sensation in the 80’s. Some of the biggest American pop stars of the day came together and collectively recorded the song to raise money for African relief work. To see Paul Simon, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Ray Charles, Tina Turner, Lionel Richie, and many others all together is magical. If you want an inspirational boost to start your day, watch the performance.

Elsewhere in the inspiration category, I saw the movie Joyeux Noel ("Merry Christmas" in English). This tells the true story of Christmas Eve, 1914 during World War I. The Germans, French, and Scottish lay down their arms and sing carols together. Touching, and highly recommended. I also saw The Pursuit of Happyness, the true story of a near-homeless man in San Francisco who turns his life around after numerous bad breaks and financial challenges.

Here’s my del.icio.us tag (other links) for "inspiration". Leave other recommendations in the comments.

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Great Leaders Talk to Dead People

Posted inPhilosophy4 Comments on Great Leaders Talk to Dead People

David Brooks gave the Wake Forest graduation speech last spring — and it’s great.

It’s titled "The River of Knowledge" — you can never go wrong with water or river metaphors. He talks about how really great people "talk to dead people":

Merely famous people have pictures of themselves on the wall. Really great people have pictures of dead people on the wall, and on their desks. It’s one of the first things I look for when I go into somebody’s office.

And they talk about these dead people. John McCain, who was here a few years ago, talks a lot about Mo Udall, a Democratic politician he loved being around. He wrote a book called "Faith of My Fathers" about his father and his father’s father and so on. Barack Obama wrote a book called "Dreams From My Father" about his own father.

All his life, Abraham Lincoln talked with the founders of this country. Winston Churchill talked with the Duke of Marlborough. Theodore Roosevelt talked with the men and women who settled the West.

The dead were alive to them, and looking over their shoulder.

In other words, really great people try to learn and understand those who came before them. He raps on this point for a bit, and then continues:

…It’s not right to say that success is something we achieve individually. Success is not something that we do or that happens to us. Success is something that happens through us.

We inherit, starting even before we are born, a great river of knowledge, a great flow from many ages and many sources. The information that comes from millions of years ago, we call brain chemistry. The information that comes from hundreds of thousands of years ago from our hunter and gatherer ancestors we call genes. The information that was handed down thousands of years ago we call religion. The information passed along hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family. The information you absorbed over the past few years at Wake Forest we call education.

But it is all information, and it flows from the deep past through us into the future. It flows from the dead through us to the living and the unborn. We exist as creatures within this hidden river of knowledge the way a trout exists in a stream or a river. We are formed by the river. It is the medium in which we live and the guide about how to live.

The great people I’ve seen talking to the dead do so because they want to connect with the highest and most inspiring parts of the river. When people make mistakes, often it is not because they are evil. It’s because they don’t have an ideal to live up to.

I like this image: Connect with the highest and most inspiring parts of the river. Brooks concludes by telling the graduates to create a posse of dead people, an entourage of heroes.

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Religion Quotes of the Day

Posted inReligion / SpiritualityLeave a comment on Religion Quotes of the Day

Ross Douthat, on the danger of conflating the experiential and ideological aspects of religion:

But the "mainspring" of religious faith for most believers – and particularly for a mystic like Mother Teresa – is the personal experience of God as a being who loves them and communicates with them, rather than the intellectual experience of Catholicism (or some other specific faith tradition) as a philosophical system that persuades them.

Mark Lilla, in his long and interesting NYT Magazine cover story, on why the Great Separation of church and state is not and will not be a given in most of the world:

As for the American experience, it is utterly exceptional: there is no other fully developed industrial society with a population so committed to its faiths (and such exotic ones), while being equally committed to the Great Separation. Our political rhetoric, which owes much to the Protestant sectarians of the 17th century, vibrates with messianic energy, and it is only thanks to a strong constitutional structure and various lucky breaks that political theology has never seriously challenged the basic legitimacy of our institutions. Americans have potentially explosive religious differences over abortion, prayer in schools, censorship, euthanasia, biological research and countless other issues, yet they generally settle them within the bounds of the Constitution. It’s a miracle.

Here’s Christopher Hitchen’s response to Lilla.

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Absent Fathers, Supportive Mothers

Posted inEntrepreneurship3 Comments on Absent Fathers, Supportive Mothers

Some experts say the combination of a distant father and a nurturing mother is especially potent in awakening the leadership potential of their sons. "There is evidence that many successful male leaders had strong, supportive mothers and rather remote, absent fathers," Manfred Kets de Vries, a professor of leadership at France’s INSEAD business school. He cited Jack Welch, Richard Branson, and Bill Clinton. And Andrew Davidson, a writer for Management Today who spent 10 years interviewing entrepreneurs, said in a 2001 article that he had "lost count of the times I have sat in a room with a successful man telling me how close he was to his mother.

From Brent Bowers’ 8 Patterns of Highly Effective Entrepreneurs.

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The Giving and Receiving of Advice

Posted inBusiness9 Comments on The Giving and Receiving of Advice

I received (an unusually high) 45 comments on my post asking for advice about studying Spanish vs. Japanese. I valued the advice, and it prompted thoughts about the fascinating world of advice giving and receiving.

As someone committed to personal growth and self-improvement, I count myself among those who look to others for feedback and guidance for how I can get better at any number of things. I’ve also given advice from time to time.

Here are some general observations on the topic from both perspectives:

* Sometimes people ask for advice but really just want your attention. People like talking things through in their own mind. Though it might appear they want explicit advice (“So I’m thinking about taking this new job, but I’m torn about the benefits package”) what they actually want is someone to hear them out, and perhaps probe a bit, but not prescribe a solution.

* Emulation: Peripheral or central. There’s a tendency to gaze at someone successful and want to copy every aspect of their life — even silly things like what they wear or eat. Emulating what a successful person does 100% rarely makes sense; when it does make sense, it’s only in situations where you’re imitating a peripheral habit. That is, it may make sense to directly copy someone’s email-management tactics if she’s superbly competent in this area, but don’t carbon copy their basic leadership style which is highly individual. When you feel the urge to emulate someone, first consider whether it’s a peripheral or central habit / characteristic.

* We get too much general advice, not enough specific. Jack Welch didn’t run a small business, and yet many small business owners look to him for specific guidance (on hiring, for example) when they’d be better off, I think, consulting a peer. Following Welch might be an act of self-protection: it’s easy to make excuses if you can point to a famous person’s piece of advice.

* It’s easy to appear to be an expert. You can speak authoritatively without being an authority.

* Overvaluing and undervaluing advice. People tend to overvalue advice when the situation is difficult and undervalue advice when the situation is easy. I saw this a lot in college admissions process — kids would get a million opinions on an admittedly important and difficult situation, but in the end they received so many contradictory thoughts that they ended up confused. On the other hand, when faced with where to go for lunch, people would do better to ask around a bit for a recommendation.

* Does money corrupt the process?. If you hire and pay a “life coach” to give you feedback on tough decisions, how does the compensation affect the coach’s advice? How does the paid nature of professional therapy affect the therapy? Is the most honest advice free? Do we overvalue advice we pay for?

Those are some initial musings. Agree? Disagree? Additions? Subtractions?

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