Home » Posts tagged 'Wisdom' (Page 43)

Tag Archives: Wisdom

The Key to Personal Success… Just Ask!

June 29, 2015 2:15 pm / Leave a comment

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.

Maybe you’re afraid of rejection; maybe you’re afraid of overstepping the bounds of the relationship; maybe you’re afraid of being a pest.

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!

Click here to read the whole article.

…as effortless as drawing breath

June 26, 2015 2:59 pm / Leave a comment

Order now on Amazon and learn to love life

Unforgivable

June 24, 2015 1:24 pm / 1 Comment on Unforgivable

Should Dylann Roof be Forgiven for the South Carolina Massacre?

In an extraordinary example of human nobility, relatives of those killed in the Charleston, South Carolina, massacre expressed their forgiveness for Dylann Roof, the domestic terrorist who opened fire and took nine lives from the historic Emanuel A.M.E. church community. The mourners’ refusal to indulge their natural human impulse for revenge and to return love for hatred shows us all how it is possible to heal our fractured society.

Proverbial Beauty: Read now at Amazon.com

On a deeper level, however, the question of forgiveness is vastly more complicated.

One of the most compelling works of Holocaust literature is The Sunflower, an anthology built around the experience of survivor Simon Wiesenthal in the Lemberg Concentration Camp. In 1943, Mr. Wiesenthal was summoned to the deathbed of Karl Seidl, a Nazi soldier haunted by the atrocities he had committed, who wanted desperately to receive forgiveness from a Jew before he died.

Mr. Wiesenthal describes how he could find nothing to say and left the soldier without uttering a word. He then grapples with the question of whether he should have offered forgiveness, ultimately offering his answer by reframing the question:

ONE FOR ALL?

The crimes committed by the Nazis were not directed against individual Jews but against the Jewish people as a whole. Consequently, the torture and torment inflicted upon any Jew was in fact a crime against every Jew. Each individual victim was not a person but one of a people — the perpetrators didn’t care who he was but what he was — and therefore no individual had the power to grant forgiveness since an entire nation was targeted through each act of individual violence.

In other words, it wasn’t a matter of whether Mr. Wiesenthal should forgive, but whether forgiveness was his to give at all.

The same reasoning applies to all hate crimes. Whether the victim is black or white, Hispanic or Asian, Jew or Gentile, citizen or immigrant, rich or poor, any act of violence motivated by identity is not merely a crime against one person but a crime against mankind. As such, it transcends mere brutality or wickedness and rises to the level of gross inhumanity. By doing so, it becomes unforgivable.

So how can an act of forgiveness be both noble and impossible? Part of the confusion stems from a lack of clear definition. What is forgiveness? And why should forgiving evil ever be considered noble?

In the best-case scenario, forgiveness is a response to contrition. When a perpetrator recognizes the evil of his own actions, sincerely regrets them, and seeks to repair or atone for the harm he caused, then to withhold forgiveness becomes an act of evil itself. In such a case, to grant forgiveness becomes not merely noble but a moral obligation.

Proverbial Beauty: Read now at Amazon.com

But what if the perpetrator feels no remorse? Or what if he has no intention of righting the wrongs he has caused?

Even in that case, if one can understand, or even imagine, what motivated an act of evil, then it might be possible to forgive the offender for his own human weakness, whether it was a momentary lapse in temper or judgment, an innate lack of moral clarity or, as may or may not be the case with Dylann Roof, demonstrable psychological instability. To be able to see past one’s own pain and find a mitigating factor to excuse violence is truly noble… even saintly.

WITHOUT REMORSE

However, in the case of conscious, calculated evil, forgiveness may actually be a perversion of morality. Moral values should be so deeply rooted within that we can’t help responding to any violation of them with indignation and outrage. If we are truly committed to the values of good, how can we possibly tolerate evil, or those who do evil, especially when they do it in the name of good?

This is what the sages of the Talmud meant when they said, Be discerning in judgment. Look for every possible means of explaining away bad behavior. But after all is said and done, evil remains evil. Nonjudgmentalism is an empty slogan that allows evil to proliferate unchecked.

What often gets lost in the discussion of forgiveness is the matter of accountability. If I break your window, my apology means nothing unless I’m willing to pay for the window. And if I’ve caused damage that can’t be repaired, punitive restitution may be the only means through which society as a whole can preserve respect for the rule of law and confidence in the institutions of justice.

The particulars are open to debate. There are legitimate grounds to oppose the death penalty, mostly based in the real concern that an imperfect legal system cannot guarantee the guilt of those sentenced to death.

But to oppose capital punishment on the grounds that the state has no right to take a life misses a larger point. One who takes the life of another member of society forfeits his own place in that society; moreover, a society will retain its respect for the sanctity of life only with the recognition that by taking a life one forfeits his own right to life as well.

To take the life of any one person is, on some level, to take the life of every person. Justice must be served. Only then may it be possible to forgive.

Proverbial Beauty: Read now at Amazon.com

Click here to read this article and more from Yonason Goldson at Jewish World Review

Dispel Uncertainty

June 11, 2015 9:41 pm / Leave a comment

9 Ways to Keep your Integrity

June 11, 2015 4:16 pm / 1 Comment on 9 Ways to Keep your Integrity

Everyone likes a good story.

I have my share to tell, having spent my prodigal youth hitchhiking cross country and circling the globe, living abroad for a decade, and teaching high school for over 20 years.

But it still happens that friends and neighbors occasionally respond to my recollections by asking: “Did that really happen?”

Read the intro to Proverbial Beauty at Amazon.

Are my tales so truly unbelievable? After all, I never claim to have flown to the sun with Icarus, to have crossed the Rubicon with Julius Caesar, or to have followed Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill.

No, I’ve merely sought to pluck insights from slightly quirky encounters and offer a bit wisdom from my observations on the human condition.

“I loved your article,” someone will say. And then, almost predictably: “Did that really happen?”

I even get it from my mother.

The new normal?

To be honest, it comes as no surprise. After all, honesty has seen its market value tumble over the years with countless reports of plagiarism, factual carelessness, and blatant fabrication.

But as troubling as such prevarication may be from the media, it’s far more disheartening when it becomes the norm among our political leaders.

The sad truth is that we expect our politicians to lie. But the brazenness with which they conjure up easily verifiable falsehoods grows ever more astonishing.

Once integrity disappears, the only motive not to lie is fear of not getting away with it — and get away with politicians have, in a society that has grown indifferent to lying.

But there is something we can do. Here are 9 ways we can prevent the erosion of our own integrity:

Read the full article here.

Who’s Number One?

June 9, 2015 3:01 pm / Leave a comment

“The fragile beauty of narcissism.”

That’s the title of a blog post I came across. The author tries to make the case — in engagingly poetic prose — that arrogance is a virtue. Having just published a book illustrating how to turn negatives into positives, I was intrigued by his efforts, but fear the gentleman doth protest too much. We have enough blights upon society without turning more vices into virtues.

The author posits that,

Arrogance is “claiming ownership without justification”, in other words, more commonly, an inflated sense of self-worth. Why is it inflated? Because it assumes that that which is the source of pride endures, when the truth is it does not.

Well, he’s half-right. “Inflated sense of self-worth” is definitely accurate. But the real root of arrogance is the assumption the one is the source of one’s own power.

Why is the arrogance of starlets, sports “heroes,” and members of Mensa so irksome? Because to be born with brains or beauty has more to do with genetics and fate than with innate worth. And although most successful athletes work and train hard to succeed, a certain amount of inborn talent is requisite to anything they may achieve through practice.

The laudable custom among many (mostly Hispanic) baseballers to point toward Heaven after getting a hit shows the humble acknowledgement that athletic prowess is not one’s own. With a single, small gesture they remind themselves — and countless spectators — Who is really Number One.

When our innate abilities lead us to believe in our own superiority, we think we have the right to devalue not only the contributions but the very existence of others. The Torah describes Moses as both “the most humble man who ever lived” and “the greatest prophet who ever would live.” Moses’ knowledge of his own greatness did not impair his humility. Just the opposite — he recognized that whatever ability he possessed came from outside himself, and also how much more he was obligated because of his natural abilities.

To paraphrase a certain president (who meant something else entirely), “You didn’t create that!”

“My point is that arrogance, narcissism, pride, all forms of hubris, are not without aesthetic value. The arrogant man believes, or at least attempts to believe, that he is or has something of unique and special value.”

The author errs by conflating arrogance with self-confidence. To believe in my own value, to seek to fulfill my potential, and to strive to push myself beyond my comfort zone toward new horizons — all that has nothing to do with arrogance. Just the opposite: an arrogant person believes he is already great and therefore has nothing to prove. In fact, studies have shown that people who overvalue their own worth are less likely to take up challenges lest they expose themselves as frauds.

Humility and modesty have largely gone out of style in our society, which is a loss for us all. Let’s try to hang on a bit longer to our contempt for arrogance.

Jewish Billionaires put their Mouths where their Money is

June 8, 2015 5:26 pm / Leave a comment

Jewish billionaires Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban have organized the first meeting of its kind, bringing together 50 Israeli and pro-Jewish corporations to push back against anti-Israel boycotts (BDS).

The real tragedy is that their efforts are necessary. The superficiality that typifies the Western World is self-evident with even the most feeble efforts to scratch the patina of political correctness that turns perpetrators into victims and victims into provocateurs.

Shame on those who perpetuate the myth that Israel is the source of Arab suffering. Shame on those who provide the millions in aide that Gaza Arabs never see because their leaders spend it on high-tech tunnels for attacking Israeli civilians. Shame on those who caused hundreds of West Bank Arabs to lose their jobs by pressuring Soda Stream to move their production plant back across the “green line.” Shame on those who don’t hold the leaders of surrounding Arab nations accountable for ignoring the plight of Arab refugees for 60 years so they can vilify Israel for their own criminal negligence.

And shame on Jimmy Carter and his ilk who perpetuate the demonstrable lie that Israel is an apartheid state.

Would an apartheid state produce an Arab citizenry that has a higher standard of living, literacy, and longer life expectancy than that of the surrounding Arab nations? Would it have permitted a sitting Arab Supreme Court justice, Arab ministers, generals, ambassadors, and consulate-generals, an Arab Israeli national soccer team captain , and an Arab Miss Israel?

But ideologues never let facts get in the way of ideology. The successful western world must be held responsible for every evil in the world, even as radicals sacrifice their own lives to destroy the societies that allow well-meaning fools to enable the agents of their own self-destruction.

Are you too sure for your own good?

June 5, 2015 2:25 pm / Leave a comment

“Understanding the distinctions between probability and certainty is one of the keys to developing a sociological imagination (and becoming an educated citizen, for that matter). One of the fascinating aspects of social science is using research tools to test assumptions through collected data—typically through multiple studies in a variety of settings.”

This insightful post by Karen Sternheimer raises two critical points.

First, aside from death and taxes, there’s no such thing as a sure thing. Everything we do is based in probable outcomes. In the game of life, we are all gamblers.

But that’s as it should be. The difference between a gambler and an investor is largely semantic. We take a chance every time we cross the street, and success in any enterprise depends on weighing risk against reward, assessing the odds of winning against the odds of losing, calculating how much might be won and how much might be lost.

“Thinking about probabilities, rather than certainties, leads us to ask questions that help us understand sociological phenomena in much more depth than assumptions do.”

The problem is that most of us don’t want to do the hard work of making sure our facts are in order and our reasoning is sound. We’d rather listen to our gut, which is notoriously unreliable; after all, it’s a lot easier to take confidence in feelings and assumptions, than to deal with uncertainty.

The second point is the likelihood of children learning from their parents’ examples. If we gamble, chances are our children will, too. If we gamble recklessly, we are setting them up for disaster. But if we never take risks, our children may grow up timid and unaccomplished.

However, if we play the odds wisely, not waiting for the sure thing that will never come but neither betting the farm on long-shots… if we do our due diligence to make cautious bets when the probabilities are in our favor and the potential losses are manageable, then odds are our children will learn to be responsible gamblers themselves and will have the best chance for success in life that we can pass on to them.

Are your kids ready? They’ll let you know.

June 4, 2015 11:47 am / Leave a comment

On a summer afternoon many years ago, I stood in my front yard and watched my neighbor teaching his four-year-old son how to pedal a new bicycle. The father hovered nervously as the boy tried to balance himself between his bike’s rear training wheels. Just then a blurred figure whisked by – my own four-year-old son, riding confidently on his own two-wheeler, sans training wheels.

“That’s amazing,” my neighbor gasped.

Was it? I hadn’t thought so, even though I couldn’t ride a bike with confidence until I was nearly 12.

I’m not one of those parents who push their children to become hyper-achievers. Rather, it was my son’s relentless petitions to remove his training wheels that had prompted me to reach into the tool box and retire that extraneous hardware to the back of the garage with so much other junk. I never consulted books or articles or experts about the age at which a boy is developmentally ready to ride a bicycle.

My son wanted to learn. Who was I to stand in his way?

It took some time on my part, and a good bit of huffing and puffing, gripping the back of the seat with white knuckles and running along beside him, first in the back yard and later in the street. But who ever said being a parent was easy?

In less than a week my son was tooling around on his own, a bit shaky at first, but more boldly and self-assured with each circuit around the neighborhood. By the end of the school year, he was still in only boy in his class who had learned to ride. It was hard not to be proud. Maybe my son really was amazing. Maybe he would excel in basketball or football as well as bicycling. Maybe he would win an athletic scholarship to UCLA or Ohio State, become a college all-star and a first-draft pick, break every professional record, and land a $50 million endorsement contract with Nike.

Or maybe not. Was I already turning into one of those over-zealous parents who live vicariously through their children and make them neurotic in the process? What if I pushed my son too hard and made him hate sports forever, or convinced him to set his heart on an unachievable goal? Wasn’t it safer to take it slow and err on the side of caution rather than encourage him to reach for the sky and risk setting him up for anxiety or disappointment?

THE ROOT OF ALL FAILURE

For decades now, psychology and education gurus have been telling us that all our problems stem from a single root: low self-esteem. When we don’t feel good about ourselves, we lack confidence in our own ability to achieve; without confidence, we can’t motivate ourselves to try; unmotivated, we never do achieve, reinforcing our feelings of inadequacy and perpetuating a vicious circle of substandard performance.

By lowering expectations, by diluting standards, by broadening the definition of success to include effort and attitude and environment, we make it possible for our children to succeed and enable their self-esteem to flourish. That’s the theory. The problem is that it doesn’t work, mostly because kids are neither as shallow nor as fragile as its advocates would have us believe.

If I have learned anything in my years standing in front of a class room, it is that kids can spot a phony a mile off – and certainly when it’s standing only a few feet away at the front of the class. Students know whether they have had to work for their grades. And every student, no matter how grade-conscious or grade-indifferent, feels better about himself for having earned a B than he does for having been given an A. Even the student who fails because of laziness learns the consequences of inaction and, with a little guidance, learns that he can climb out of the hole he has dug for himself.

THE ULTIMATE GIFT

True, low self-esteem will produce a vicious circle of low achievement. But high yet realistic standards will create a virtuous circle wherein genuine achievement begets sincere aspirations to attain ever-higher goals. By sheltering our children from expectations that challenge their abilities, we steal from them the opportunity to experience the joy of meaningful accomplishment and condemn them to a life of complacency and mediocrity… as well as that bugaboo, low self-esteem.

King Solomon warned us, parents and educators alike: teach every youth according to his own way. Each child is a unique combination of talents, abilities, emotions, and desires. To help our children channel those qualities in the pursuit of excellence, to awaken in them the passion to reach for the stars – this is the greatest gift we can give them.

My son hasn’t grown up to become an Olympic athlete. I’ll probably never find his name in a sports almanac or see his picture on a box of Wheaties. But I’ll always remember the expression on his face that summer’s day as he zipped up and down the street, standing up on his pedals, shooting me a grin as he watched me watching him and recognized the pride I felt.

No one ever told him that four-year-olds can’t ride bicycles.

On his next pass, he locked down his coaster breaks and skidded to a stop. “Will you teach me to ride with no hands?” he asked, eager to conquer his next mountain.

“Not today,” I said with a smile. Understanding limits also builds self-esteem.

“Okay,” he said. And, still grinning, he was on his way again.

Originally published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Remembering Forgetfulness

June 3, 2015 2:51 pm / Leave a comment

“Too many people become members of the ‘Bad Memory Club’ and focus on the 5% of the time that their memory fails them. If you think you have a bad memory, it means you have a good one because you can remember where your memory has gone wrong. Think about how much data you already have stored in your memory… Your memory does a lot right, so ask yourself, “How does my memory serve me – how did it serve me today?”

Kevin Horsley

We all have the power to radically improve the quality of our lives by turning negatives into positives. With modest but consistent effort, we can train ourselves to focus on the good, initiating a virtuous circle of positive thinking that leads to increasingly positive actions and results.

Sometimes all it takes is remembering to try.

Tag Archives: Wisdom

Should Dylann Roof be Forgiven for the South Carolina Massacre?

The new normal?

Post navigation