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Tag Archives: Virtue
Winning Through Consensus
From the moment our current president began preparing for his ascension to power, the outgoing president began showing signs of concern — if not outright anxiety — over his legacy. And he had good reason.
Whether or not one approved of Mr. Obama’s policies or performance, there is one undeniable fact: as president, he made little effort to govern by consensus.
Emphasizing Empathy
In our age of isolation, self-absorption, and ROI, we’ve forgotten that empathy is not merely an essential component of civil society but also makes good business sense.
These observations from LaRae Quy writing for SmartBrief are well worth reading:
Stop Waiting for Success… Just Ask!
Young Student Stressed and Overwhelmed asking for Help
Does this sound familiar?
You’re running out the door to take your wife to the airport, only to discover you have a flat tire. You don’t have time to wait for a taxi or the auto club. You want to ask your neighbor for a ride, but you’re afraid it’s too much of an imposition.
Or… you see someone on the subway reading a book by your favorite author or about a topic you find fascinating. You want to strike up a conversation, but you’re afraid of intruding on the other person’s privacy.
Or… you have a lead on a promising job opportunity, and an acquaintance has dealings with your prospective employer. You want to ask her to make an introduction, but you don’t want to put her in an uncomfortable position.
So what are you afraid of:
- Rejection?
- Overstepping boundaries?
- Being a pest?
- All of the above?
Sure, there are boundaries, and sometimes we do cross them. So if these scenarios arise often, you might need to examine whether you’re overly needy.
But most of us aren’t looking for such situations; they just happen. And when they do, here’s the key: just ask!
Conquer Laziness by Starting Small
Readers of a certain age may remember an old Goodyear tire commercial with the tag line, “You can pay me now, or pay me later.”
The applications go way beyond auto repair. That’s what Shaomin Li, professor of international business at Virginia’s Old Dominion University, discovered on a business trip to Taiwan.
As he was being chauffeured from one venue to the next, Professor Li noticed that his host always backed into parking lot spaces, opting for often tricky and laborious maneuvering over the simpler method of pulling in straight forward.
Detecting a wider pattern of behavior, Professor Li conducted his own experiment. He discovered that 88% of Chinese drivers back in when they park, in contrast to 6% of American drivers.
“All of a sudden,” recounts Professor Li, “I said, gee – isn’t this delayed gratification?”
We shouldn’t jump to conclusions based on a single study, but this observation does not appear in a vacuum. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell investigates the popular stereotype that transplanted Asians excel academically and professionally compared with homegrown Americans.
Mr. Gladwell discovered that the stereotype is much more accurate among southern Chinese than among northern Chinese, and he identifies a single reason for the difference:
Rice paddies.
A bridge over untroubled waters
After 50 years, no one believed it would ever happen. That’s why they called it the bridge that was going nowhere.
But now that’s all water under the… well, you know. The new St. Croix Crossing Bridge opened last week to great fanfare, connecting eastern Minnesota with western Wisconsin and replacing the Stillwater lift bridge that was built in 1931.
Which just goes to show that two sides are never so far apart that they can’t be brought together.
The project was first proposed way back in the 1960s, but every imaginable obstacle conspired to prevent its construction. Needless to say, funding was the first challenge. Then came the predictable squabbling among federal and local agencies. Finally, the inevitable lawsuits brought by the environmental lobby threatened to kill the plan before it could begin.
People said it would take a miracle for the bridge to get built. What they got was something even more remarkable than divine intervention.
They got cooperation.
In 2012, an unlikely alliance formed between two Minnesota congresswomen, Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar and then-Republican Representative Michele Bachmann
Their task was herculean. They had to persuade, convince, and cajole U. S. representatives and senators, as well as state governors and local legislators, to sign off on the project. Incredibly, they had to get unanimous approval from all 100 U. S. senators to gain an exemption from the 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Ms. Klobuchar personally prevailed upon every one of her colleagues in the senate to give their support.
The final product is more than just a river crossing. It’s a work of art, a thing of beauty. The bridge is a hybrid, a cross between box girder and cable-stayed designs, only the second like it in the country. The innovative design minimizes the number of piers in the water while keeping the tops of the towers below the tree-line. Even opponents of the bridge grudgingly conceded that their fears were unfounded.
Could there be a more fitting allegory for our troubled times than the new “miracle bridge” of St. Croix? In a time of knee-jerk partisanship, of hyperbolic rhetoric, of militant groupthink that drives all proponents of moderation to the far extremes lest they be slaughtered on the altar of ideology by their own comrades – in times like these it is the concerted effort to bridge the divide that can calm the waters below. All that’s needed is the courage set aside personal agendas and the willingness to work together for the general welfare.
Nothing puts an end to quarreling faster than a spirit of common purpose. Nothing builds trust more certainly than a shared commitment and collaboration toward a universal goal. The feeling of being united in a higher mission, combined with a sense of urgency to achieve results, raises the rewards of success above egoism and ideology.
Once we resolve to make the effort and take the first step, almost anything is possible.
King Solomon says, Like water reflects one face to another, so too the heart of one man to his fellow. By showing our adversaries that we are committed to peaceful cooperation, the chances increase dramatically that they will see themselves reflected in our sincere intentions and respond in kind.
Of course, there will always be those too petty to seek common ground. But strong, sure leadership will relegate them to the footnotes of history while inspiring others to discover greatness within themselves. With vision and determination, we can refashion the world into a place where human spirit can overcome any obstacle and truly soar toward the heavens.
Take Pleasure in Taking the High Road
We all know that two wrongs don’t make a right. But does one right cancel out one wrong?
There’s a good chance you believe that it does. Research suggests that our brains are wired to think of a good deed as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card.
Psychologists call it licensing. It works like this:
You come home from a hard workout at the gym and immediately sit down to a double-helping of ice cream with chocolate syrup and whipped cream. The virtuous behavior of exercising makes you feel better about yourself, which then gives you license to indulge the less virtuous behavior of overdosing on sugar. The responsible act of taking care of yourself makes it easier to rationalize letting yourself go.
But Aaron Garvey and Lisa Bolton of the University of Kentucky have discovered that it goes even further than that.
WE ARE WHAT WE THINK
In their research, they took two groups of volunteers and gave them cookies to eat. The cookies were identical for each group, but in one group they were labeled “healthy.” After finishing their cookies, the subjects were given candy.
As the psychology of licensing would suggest, subjects who had eaten the “healthy” cookies ate more candy than the other group. But not for the reason we might have thought.
Garvey and Bolton measured not only the amount of candy eaten but also the amount of pleasure experienced from the candy. They found that the candy actually tasted better to the people who believed they had eaten healthy cookies.
Professor Garvey identified two implications from his research. First, if we do something virtuous before indulging in pleasure, we can actually make the experience of pleasure more pleasurable.
Second, if we reframe our attitude toward responsibilties and acts of virtue by thinking of them as commitments that we want to do rather than obligations that we have to do, we can make vices less attractive and protect ourselves from the damaging fallout of licensing.
THE MOST ENDURING PLEASURE
These two implications teach us an electrifying lesson in human free will. Through disciplined thinking, I can choose whether to make my self-indulgence more or less pleasurable. And that discipline takes the form of how motivated I am to choose virtue over vice.
In other words, do I want to trick my brain into getting more pleasure from healthy acts or from unhealthy acts? And if getting more psychological pleasure from virtue means that I’ll become less interested in the physical pleasure of vice, why would I ever want to choose vice over virtue?
We know from experience that physical pleasure is nothing more than psychological junk food. Enjoyments of the flesh feel good in the heat of the moment, but they leave a pleasure vacuum the instant they’re over. In contrast, emotional pleasures linger, and profound emotional satisfaction endures long after the source of pleasure has passed.
Most of all, the warm feelings we can get from family, community, and the sense of contribution to a higher purpose stay with us constantly. The less we distract ourselves with empty physical gratification, the more intense and continuous those emotional pleasures become.
King Solomon says, One who loves pleasure will be a man of want, and one who loves wine and oil will never become rich.
In a society that has increasingly debased the nobility of human emotion, people say that they love their cars, they love to sleep, they love to go to the beach, they love steak and wine. But if these are the objects of our love, what emotion is left for us to feel for our husbands and our wives, for our parents and our children, for the sources of inspiration that beckon us to moderate our lust and pursue loftier, more satisfying ideals?
The comics page can give us a chuckle, but it doesn’t enrich our minds like a good story. A jingle on the radio might get stuck in our head, but it doesn’t move the heart like a symphony. A passing flirtation may set us briefly a-tingle, but it is a sorry substitute for a lifetime of commitment.
Anything worthwhile requires investment and effort. Life is too short to squander it on fleeting pleasures when there is so much real joy for us to find.
Yonason Goldson 