Category Archives: Random

I recently read long-ish profiles of James Franco and Matt Taibbi. After reading each one, I thought, "They are both leading very full lives." In a good way.

From The James Franco Project in New York magazine:

According to everyone I spoke with, Franco has an unusually high metabolism for productivity. He seems to suffer, or to benefit, from the opposite of ADHD: a superhuman ability to focus that allows him to shuttle quickly between projects and to read happily in the midst of chaos. He hates wasting time—a category that includes, for him, sleeping. (He’ll get a few hours a night, then survive on catnaps, which he can fall into at any second, sometimes even in the middle of a conversation.) He doesn’t drink or smoke or—despite his convincingness in Pineapple Express—do drugs. He’s engineered his life so he can spend all his time either making or learning about art. When I asked people if Franco actually does all of his own homework, some of them literally laughed right out loud at me, because apparently homework is all James Franco ever really wants to do. The photo of him sleeping in class, according to his assistant, wasn’t even from one of his classes: It was an extra lecture he was sitting in on, after a full day of work and school, because he wanted to hear the speaker.

From Lost Exile in Vanity Fair, which is more an overview of a subversive English language newspaper Taibbi ran in Moscow:

Taibbi masqueraded as an executive from the New York Jets and tried to recruit Mikhail Gorbachev to move to New Jersey to become a motivational coach for the team. Later, reporting from Manhattan, he exposed Wall Street’s complicity in 1998’s disastrous ruble devaluation, bought a gorilla suit, walked to Goldman Sachs’s headquarters on Water Street, and sat down on the lobby floor for lunch, announcing to the security guards, “If Goldman Sachs can make a $50 million commission selling worthless Russian debt, then I can come into their offices in a gorilla suit and eat a sandwich on their floor.” The Exile took overt moral stands, too, vigorously opposing most American military actions, including the bombing of Serbia in 1999, when it published a Moscow city map showing the offices of American defense contractors contributing to the war, with the hope of inciting protests. Ames and Taibbi even staged their own protest near the U.S. Embassy. Taibbi held up a “free mike tyson” sign.

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I had never heard of James Franco prior to reading the article. So I went to YouTube, typed in his name, and watched a bit of his interview with Jimmy Kimmel. With YouTube, it's not about the video. It's about how idiotic and incoherent or otherwise hilarious the comments section will be. For the Kimmel clip, the comments didn't disappoint. The very first one from CrayolaBabez: "I WOULD HAVE CLIMBED THE SIDE OF THE FUCKING BUILDING AND RAPED HIM, HE;S SO BEAUTIFUL. OH MY GOD."

Listen to conversations around you. As people tell and recount stories, do they directly quote someone (… “Yeah, Gates finally said, ‘We should really get together after New Year’s.’” …) or do they simply paraphrase and reframe a story without quoting dialogue directly (… “I saw Gates, and he finally said we should get together after New Year’s.” …)?

I’ve been listening and wondering, is there a difference between the two? If someone directly quotes dialogue, tries to tell stories by playing roles in a conversation rather than paraphrasing it, does it indicate they can empathize more or less? Do they just tell stories differently? It’s a Quotation Litmus Test in the making.

That's from Liz Danzico of the popular blog Bobulate, in semi-reply to my thought on the I'm-Proud-of-You Litmus Test. The most innocent explanation for why someone role plays versus paraphrases when recounting a story has to do with the uniqueness of the dialogue and the storyteller's ability to recall the exact wording. Liz ponders a more complex explanation which is whether role playing vs. paraphrasing can reveal the storyteller's empathy to the people at hand. Definitely plausible. When telling a story of which we disapprove or shun we're more likely to quote characters' words directly; when telling a story that we're more keen to associate with, we'll paraphrase into our own language.

For new readers, litmus tests are small, quick things you can look for in another person's behavior, language, interests, etc. that can reliably predict a bigger idea.

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Other links from around the web:

• Daniel Drezner and Matthew Yglesias discuss public diplomacy in this 17 minute video excerpt. Worth watching and related to my post the other week the real work of American diplomats abroad. Also, note Drezner's and Yglesias's conversation rhythem — it's natural, respectful, forward-moving. Everything a conversation should be. (Granted, they're in agreement, which is easier, but still.)
• Glengarry Glen-Christmas: Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live does a Christmas edition of his famous Glengarry Glen-Ross sales scene.
• Seth Godin offers good tips on how to organize a retreat / event.
• Dan Ariely on the Significant Objects Project, a fascinating case of how narrative adds meaning.
• Need a technical co-founder? Charlie O'Donnell says hire a product design lead first.
• Mark Suster continues write an outstanding blog about entrepreneurship and venture capital.

While the modern medical name for the feeling produced by a new challenge or large goal is stress, for countless generations it went by the old, familiar name of fear. Even now, I've found that the most successful people are the ones who gaze fear unblinkingly. Instead of relying on terms like anxiety, stress, or nervousness, they speak openly of being frightened by their responsibilities and challenges. Here's Jack Welch, the past CEO of General Electric: "Everyone who is running something goes home at night and wrestles with the same fear: Am I going to be the one who blows this place up?" Chuck Jones, the creator of Pepe le Pew and Wile E. Coyote, emphasized that "fear is the most important factor in any creative work." And Sally Ride, the astronaut, is unafraid to talk plainly of fear: "All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary."

I was puzzled why so many remarkable people preferred the word fear to stress or anxiety. The answer came to me one day while I was observing physicians in the course of their training. I was following one of our family-practice resident physicians through the course of her day in the health center, seeing children and adults for the wide variety of maladies that bring people to a primary care physician. I noticed that when adults came to see a physician and talk about their emotional pain, they chose words such as stress, anxiety, depression, nervous, and tense. But when I observed children talking about their feeling, they talked about being scared, sad, or afraid.

It's my conclusion that the reason for the difference in word choice had less to do with the symptoms and more to do with expectations. The children assumed their feelings were normal. Children know they live in a world they cannot control. They have no say in whether their parents are in a good mood or bad, or whether their teachers are nice or mean. They understand that fear is a part of their lives.

Adults, I believe, assume that if they are living correctly, they can control the event around them. When fear does appear, it seems all wrong–so adults prefer to call it by the names for psychiatric disease. Fear becomes a disorder, something to put in a box with a tidy label of "stress" or "anxiety."

This approach to fear is unproductive. If your expectation is that a well-run life should always be orderly, you are setting yourself up for panic and defeat. If you assume that a new job or relationship or health goal is supposed to be easy, you will feel angry and confused when fear arises–and do anything to make it disappear.

Excerpt from One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way by Robert Maurer via Todd Sattersten.

Some wise men believe fear is the mindkiller. That could be. I prefer to think about fear like Mike Tyson did: it's like fire, something that can cook your food and heat your house, or it's something that can burn down your house and destroy you. Either way, per the excerpt above, I think using the word fear is important — that's what it is, and it's not going away.

The commenter Onjibonrenat, on my post How to Draw an Owl, adds a few more steps to the process of achieving mastery:

1. Start
2. Keep going.
3. You think you're starting to get the hang of it.
4. You see someone else's work and feel undeniable misery.
5. Keep going.
6. Keep going.
7. You feel like maybe, possibly, you kinda got it now.
8. You don't.
9. Keep going.
10. You ask for someone else's opinion–their response is standoffish, though polite.
11. Depression.
12. Keep going.
13. Keep going.
14. You ask someone else's opinion–their response is favorable.
15. They have no idea what they're talking about.
16. Keep going.
17. You feel semi-kinda favorable and maybe even a little proud of what you can do now.
18. Self-loathing chastisement.
19. Depression
20. Keep going.
21. You ask someone else's opinion–they respond quite favorably.
22. They're still wrong.
23. Depression.
24. Keep going though you can't possibly imagine why.
25. Become restless.
26. Receive some measure of praise from a trustworthy opinion.
27. They're still fucking wrong (Right?)
28. Keep going just because there's nothing else to do.
29. Mastery arrives, you mistake it for a gust of wind.
30. Keep. Fucking. Going.

At the presidential inauguration in 2008, Barack Obama's daughters took out their digital cameras and snapped photos of the historic scene.

At the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, the American basketball players whipped out their video camcorders while walking and waving to fans.

At the Seinfeld reunion on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Jason Alexander and Julia Louis Dreyfus snapped photos of each other on the set of Jerry's apartment.

In each case, there were hundreds (if not thousands) of high-end cameras capturing every moment. Yet, Malia Obama, LeBron James, and Jason Alexander all wanted their own photos from their exact point-of-view.

This happens to us lay folk when we travel. Everyone takes pictures of the Eiffel Tower in Paris even though thousands of professional photos are one click away on the web. I wasn't aware this tendency held strong at the highest levels of celebrity, folks whose entire lives are photographed and documented by the media.

The power of ownership over something; the power of personal perspective.

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Some links:

• Penelope Trunk on how to take intelligent risks.
• Will Wilkinson's awesome self-defense, for political philosophy geeks only.
• Ross Rosenbaum on the banality of narcissism.
• Amazing time-lapse photography of fog over the San Francisco bay."The Unseen Sea."
• Steven Moody commented on an older post of mine about asking yourself what's remained constant (as opposed to obsessing about what's changed): "I consider my need for change to include work, location, and intimate relations; it's crucial for me to have 1-2 of these remain constant, while I'll get bored if all three are constant."