A Tale of Two Cities, Revisited

 

Two years ago I wrote a post with this same title. I am revisiting the premise in light of this 2^nd Trump administration’s steady attack on and rhetoric about cities. The previous post was a little more abstract; this one will attempt to be a little more connected. 

Let me start by saying that, perhaps to the chagrin of everyone who reads this post regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, I’m going to take somewhat of a centrist perspective on this topic. 

It is clear to me that Trump has found political success by weaponizing the grievance of those in this country who feel they have been harmed by such things as globalization, DEI, and liberal media bias. It is difficult to not read racism into such impulses and into the president’s stoking those emotions. I condemn this line of thinking and find its continued usage and popularity to be horrifying for our republic. 

Nevertheless, I recognize that it can be infuriating when, in response to a variety of complaints, some justified and some not, folks are gas-lighted and shouted down and canceled. I believe globalization is largely good for humanity and should be encouraged, but I acknowledge it has its downsides, and to be told that to think otherwise is backwards is unkind. Similarly, I believe that DEI is critically important to heal old wounds and move towards a world that lifts up all people, but some applications of it are not without their critiques and there must be room given to express and resolve those critiques, rather than having the door self-righteously closed on any possible pushback. Finally, I believe liberal media bias exists, as does conservative media bias, so to claim that anyone is above reproach here is foolhardy, and yet no one seems to be willing to admit that they are part of the problem or have themselves been hoodwinked into only hearing half the story. 

Which brings us to a topic that is near and dear to my heart, American cities. One side vilifies cities as dangerous and uncouth in ways that are hard to not read racism into. I condemn a perspective of cities that is a caricature, and an incorrect and racially veiled one at that, since cities are complex and wonderful and important. But I also disagree with a viewpoint that must, in order to negate the attack on cities, assert that there is nothing fundamentally wrong that requires sustained action in response and that to merely suggest so is wrong.

Let me be more specific. I will say that as a city-dweller myself, I take necessary precautions but otherwise feel that where I live and raise a family is safe for me and my wife and kids. However, we live in a nice neighborhood and largely do not go out at night. In our own cities, and in cities across this country, there are millions of households that are not nearly as well off as we are, many of whom are households of color, who have felt and in many tragic cases borne the direct impact of crime and violence. To hear from President Trump that cities are dangerous and heavy-handed response is needed probably rubs a lot of households the wrong way. Such assertions come across as projecting non-urban fragility onto cities, with a not so thinly veiled racial bite to it. But for mostly white and mostly affluent progressive voices to proclaim that cities are universally safe and no changes are needed probably rubs those same households the wrong way as well. It is patronizing that those most affected by urban crime are expected to either accept current levels of vulnerability or have their very real stories of pain dismissed as false or unimportant. 

This post hasn’t been very articulate, but I hope you understand where I’m coming from. From where I sit, cities are amazing and should be invested in and celebrated, not vilified and demonized. It worries me that such anti-city rhetoric is becoming more emboldened and more celebrated. We are all worse off if our cities decline, and the frightening thing is that city haters seem to either not know this, or willfully know this and yet cruelly prefer that others suffer even if it means they do too. 

On the other hand, part of the positive attention cities should be receiving should be to take seriously the challenges of crime and violence we face, unfortunately disproportionately borne in neighborhoods with the least amount of resources and power, rather than have those challenges be swept under the rug by people who are more buffered against those challenges in the spirit of opposing a president they despise. Winning the next election and scoring political points are, for millions of households around this country, far less important than doing what is needed to make our great cities safer and better. Let's take that very reasonable desire seriously and do what we can to honor it. Let's not demonize our cities or wish them ill. Let's also not live in a fantasy world in which there is no crime problem in our cities or that somehow current levels are acceptable and don't require some intervention; we may disagree on what the right intervention is, but we ought not gaslight those who suffer the most from crime by disregarding their pain.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium," by Carl Sagan.

 

 

I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It’s hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said “billion” many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said “billions and billions.” For one thing, it’s too imprecise. How many billions are “billions and billions”? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? “Billions and billions” is pretty vague. When we reconfigured and updated the series, I checked—and sure enough, I never said it. 

But Johnny Carson—on whose Tonight Show I’d appeared almost thirty times over the years—said it. He’d dress up in a corduroy jacket, a turtleneck sweater, and something like a mop for a wig. He had created a rough imitation of me, a kind of Doppelgänger, that went around saying “billions and billions” on late-night television. It used to bother me a little to have some simulacrum of my persona wandering off on its own, saying things that friends and colleagues would report to me the next morning. (Despite the disguise, Carson—a serious amateur astronomer—would often make my imitation talk real science.) 

Astonishingly, “billions and billions” stuck. People liked the sound of it. Even today, I’m stopped on the street or on an airplane or at a party and asked, a little shyly, if I wouldn’t—just for them—say “billions and billions.”  

“You know, I didn’t actually say it,” I tell them. 

“It’s okay,” they reply. “Say it anyway.”



Only at visible and immediately adjacent frequencies are any significant differences in skin reflectivity manifest. People of Northern European ancestry and people of Central African ancestry are equally black in the ultraviolet and in the infrared, where nearly all organic molecules, not just melanin, absorb light. Only in the visible, where many molecules are transparent, is the anomaly of white skin even possible. Over most of the spectrum, all humans are black.



Say you’re designing a bridge or skyscraper. It’s customary to build in, to demand, a tolerance to catastrophic failure far beyond what the likely stresses will be. Why? Because the consequences of the collapse of the bridge or skyscraper are so serious, you must be sure. You need very reliable guarantees. The same approach, I think, must be adopted for local, regional, and global environmental problems. And here, as I’ve said, there is great resistance, in part because large amounts of money are required from government and industry. For this reason, we will increasingly see attempts to discredit global warming. But money is also needed to truss up bridges and to reinforce skyscrapers. This is considered a normal part of the cost of building big. Designers and builders who cut corners and take no such precautions are not considered prudent capitalists because they don’t waste money on implausible contingencies. They are considered criminals. There are laws to make sure bridges and skyscrapers don’t fall down. Shouldn’t we also have laws and moral proscriptions treating the potentially far more serious environmental issues?



For many Americans, communism means poverty, backwardness, the Gulag for speaking one’s mind, a ruthless crushing of the human spirit, and a thirst to conquer the world. For many Soviets, capitalism means heartless and insatiable greed, racism, war, economic instability, and a worldwide conspiracy of the rich against the poor. These are caricatures—but not wholly so—and over the years Soviet and American actions have given them some credence and plausibility. 

These caricatures persist because they are partly true, but also because they are useful. If there is an implacable enemy, then bureaucrats have a ready excuse for why prices go up, why consumer goods are unavailable, why the nation is noncompetitive in world markets, why there are large numbers of unemployed and homeless people, or why criticism of leaders is unpatriotic and impermissible—and especially why so supreme an evil as nuclear weapons must be deployed in the tens of thousands. But if the adversary is insufficiently wicked, the incompetence and failed vision of government officials cannot be so easily ignored. Bureaucrats have motives for inventing enemies and exaggerating their misdeeds.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Daily Rituals: How Artists Work," by Mason Currey.

 

Beethoven rose at dawn and wasted little time getting down to work. His breakfast was coffee, which he prepared himself with great care—he determined that there should be sixty beans per cup, and he often counted them out one by one for a precise dose. Then he sat at his desk and worked until 2:00 or 3:00, taking the occasional break to walk outdoors, which aided his creativity. (Perhaps for this reason, Beethoven’s productivity was generally higher during the warmer months.) 

After a midday dinner, Beethoven embarked on a long, vigorous walk, which would occupy much of the rest of the afternoon. He always carried a pencil and a couple of sheets of music paper in his pocket, to record chance musical thoughts. As the day wound down, he might stop at a tavern to read the newspapers. Evenings were often spent with company or at the theater, although in winter he preferred to stay home and read. Supper was usually a simple affair—a bowl of soup, say, and some leftovers from dinner. Beethoven enjoyed wine with his food, and he liked to have a glass of beer and a pipe after supper. He rarely worked on his music in the evening, and he retired early, going to bed at 10:00 at the latest.



After lunch, Mahler would drag Alma on a three- or four-hour-long walk along the shore, stopping occasionally to jot down ideas in his notebook, beating time in the air with his pencil. These composing breaks would sometimes last for an hour or longer, during which time Alma would sit on a branch or in the grass, not daring to look at her husband. “If his inspiration pleased him he smiled back at me,” she recalled. “He knew that nothing in the world was a greater joy to me.” In reality, Alma was not quite so sanguine about her new station as dutiful wife to a moody, solitary artist. (Prior to their marriage, she had been a promising composer in her own right, but Mahler had made her quit, saying that there could be only one composer in the family.) As she wrote in her diary that July, “There’s such a struggle going on in me! And a miserable longing for someone who thinks OF ME, who helps me to find MYSELF! I’ve sunk to the level of a housekeeper!”



As for the popular conception that Faulkner drank while writing, it’s unclear whether this is true. Several of his friends and acquaintances reported the habit, but his daughter emphatically denied it, insisting that he “always wrote when sober, and would drink afterwards.” In any case, he did not seem to need an inducement for his creativity. During his most fertile years, from the late 1920s through the early ’40s, Faulkner worked at an astonishing pace, often completing three thousand words a day and occasionally twice that amount. (He once wrote to his mother that he had managed ten thousand words in one day, working between 10:00 A.M. and midnight—a personal record.) “I write when the spirit moves me,” Faulkner said, “and the spirit moves me every day.”



The one drawback to this self-made schedule, Murakami admitted in a 2008 essay, is that it doesn’t allow for much of a social life. “People are offended when you repeatedly turn down their invitations,” he wrote. But he decided that the indispensable relationship in his life was with his readers. “My readers would welcome whatever life style I chose, as long as I made sure each new work was an improvement over the last. And shouldn’t that be my duty—and my top priority—as a novelist?”

Given the number of hours she spends at the desk, Oates has pointed out, her productivity is not really so remarkable. “I write and write and write, and rewrite, and even if I retain only a single page from a full day’s work, it is a single page, and these pages add up,” she told one interviewer. “As a result I have acquired the reputation over the years of being prolix when in fact I am measured against people who simply don’t work as hard or as long.” This doesn’t mean that she always finds the work pleasant or easy; the first several weeks of a new novel, Oates has said, are particularly difficult and demoralizing: “Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.”

Shostakovich’s contemporaries do not recall seeing him working, at least not in the traditional sense. The Russian composer was able to conceptualize a new work entirely in his head, and then write it down with extreme rapidity—if uninterrupted, he could average twenty or thirty pages of score a day, making virtually no corrections as he went. “I always found it amazing that he never needed to try things out on the piano,” his younger sister recalled. “He just sat down, wrote out whatever he heard in his head, and then played it through complete on the piano.” But this feat was apparently preceded by hours or days of mental composition—during which he “appeared to be a man of great inner tensions,” the musicologist Alexei Ikonnikov observed, “with his continually moving, ‘speaking’ hands, which were never at rest.”



Like a lot of architects, Kahn worked as a university professor at the same time that he maintained a busy private practice. During his professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, Kahn would teach during the day, head home in the afternoon, then go into his office at night and begin a new “day” of work at 10:30 P.M. When he got tired, he would sleep on a bench in his office for a few hours before moving back to the drafting table. This was both inspiring and intimidating for his employees, who were expected to put in similarly long hours. One of Kahn’s associates remembered, “Lou had so much energy that it was hard for him to see that other people might not have as much.”



“To me George was a little sad all the time because he had this compulsion to work,” Ira Gershwin said of his brother. “He never relaxed.” Indeed, Gershwin typically worked for twelve hours or more a day, beginning in the late morning and going until past midnight. He started the day with a breakfast of eggs, toast, coffee, and orange juice, then immediately began composing, sitting at the piano in his pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers. He would take breaks for a mid-afternoon lunch, a late-afternoon walk, and supper at about 8:00. If Gershwin had a party to attend in the evening, it was not unusual for him to return home after midnight and plunge back into work until dawn. He was dismissive of inspiration, saying that if he waited for the muse he would compose at most three songs a year. It was better to work every day. “Like the pugilist,” Gershwin said, “the songwriter must always keep in training.”

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Roots," by Alex Haley .

"He said that three groups of people lived in every village. First were those you could see - walking around, eating, sleeping, and working. Second were the ancestors, whom Grandma Yaisa had now joined.

'And the third people - who are they?' asked Kunta.

'The third people,' said Omoro, 'are those waiting to be born.'"

“To the north coast of Africa, the toubob ships bring porcelain, spices, cloth, horses, and countless things made by men,” said Saloum. “Then, camels and donkeys bear those goods inland to places like Sijilmasa, Ghadames, and Marrakech.” The moving finger of Janneh showed where those cities were. “And as we sit here tonight,” said Saloum, “there are many men with heavy headloads crossing deep forests taking our own African goods—ivory, skins, olives, dates, kola nuts, cotton, copper, precious stones—back to the toubob’s ships.”

Kunta’s mind reeled at what he heard, and he vowed silently that someday he too would venture to such exciting places.

Four of us now, thought Kunta, lying awake later that night. Four brothers—four sons for his mother and father. He thought how that would sound in the Kinte family history when it was told by griots for hundreds of rains in the future. After Omoro, thought Kunta, he would be the first man of the family when he returned to Juffure. Not only was he learning to be a man, but he was also learning many, many things he would be able to teach Lamin, as already he had taught him so many of the things of boyhood. At least he would teach him that which was permissible for boys to know, and then Lamin would teach Suwadu, and Suwadu would teach this new one whom Kunta had not even seen, whose name was Madi. And some day, Kunta thought as he drifted off to sleep, when he was as old as Omoro, he would have sons of his own, and it would all begin again.

In his hut after the moro had gone that night, Kunta lay awake thinking how so many things—indeed, nearly everything they had learned—all tied together. The past seemed with the present, the present with the future, the dead with the living and those yet to be born; he himself with his family, his mates, his village, his tribe, his Africa; the world of man with the world of animals and growing things—they all lived with Allah. Kunta felt very small, yet very large. Perhaps, he thought, this is what it means to become a man.

Just then the black’s club smashed into Kunta once again, staggering him to his knees, and the toubob sprang loose. His head ready to explode, his body reeling, raging at his own weakness, Kunta reared up and roared, flailing blindly at the air, everything blurred with tears and blood and sweat. He was fighting for more than his life now. Omoro! Binta! Lamin! Suwadu! Madi! The toubob’s heavy club crashed against his temple. And all went black.

The moans of the Foulah shivered through the black hold. Then, after a while, a clear voice called out in Mandinka, “Share his pain! We must be in this place as one village!” The voice belonged to an elder. He was right. The Foulah’s pains had been as Kunta’s own. He felt himself about to burst with rage. He also felt, in some nameless way, a terror greater than he had ever known before, and it seemed to spread from the marrow of his bones. Part of him wanted to die, to escape all of this; but no, he must live to avenge it. He forced himself to lie absolutely still. It took a long while, but finally he felt his strain and confusion, even his body’s pains, begin to ebb—except for the place between his shoulders where he had been burned with the hot iron. He found that his mind could focus better now on the only choice that seemed to lie before him and the others: Either they would all die in this nightmare place, or somehow the toubob would have to be overcome and killed.

As Kunta’s own condition steadily worsened, despite everything Bell and the massa could do, her prayers became more and more fervent. Kunta’s strange, silent, stubborn ways had been entirely forgotten as, herself too tired to sleep, she sat by his bed each night as he lay sweating heavily, tossing, moaning, or at times babbling in spells of delirium beneath the several quilts she’d piled on him. She would hold his hot, dry hand in hers, desperately afraid that she might never be able to tell him what had taken this, after all these years, for her fully to realize: that he was a man of caliber, of strength, and of character, that she had never known the equal of, and she loved him very deeply.

The massa turned and walked very quickly with his head down back into the house, past Bell huddled sobbing by the bottom step. As if Kunta were sleepwalking, he came cripping slowly back up the driveway—when an African remembrance flashed into his mind, and near the front of the house he bent down and started peering around. Determining the clearest prints that Kizzy’s bare feet had left in the dust, scooping up the double handful containing those footprints, he went rushing toward the cabin: The ancient forefathers said that precious dust kept in some safe place would insure Kizzy’s return to where she made the footprints. He burst through the cabin’s open door, his eyes sweeping the room and falling upon his gourd on a shelf containing his pebbles. Springing over there, in the instant before opening his cupped hands to drop in the dirt, suddenly he knew the truth: His Kizzy was gone; she would not return. He would never see his Kizzy again.

His face contorting, Kunta flung his dust toward the cabin’s roof. Tears bursting from his eyes, snatching his heavy gourd up high over his head, his mouth wide in a soundless scream, he hurled the gourd down with all his strength, and it shattered against the packed-earth floor, his 662 pebbles representing each month of his 55 rains flying out, ricocheting wildly in all directions.

In my mind’s eye, rather as if it were mistily being projected on a screen, I began envisioning descriptions I had read of how collectively millions of our ancestors had been enslaved. Many thousands were individually kidnapped, as my own forebear Kunta had been, but into the millions had come awake screaming in the night, dashing out into the bedlam of raided villages, which were often in flames. The captured able survivors were linked neck-by-neck with thongs into processions called “coffles,” which were sometimes as much as a mile in length. I envisioned the many dying, or left to die when they were too weak to continue the torturous march toward the coast, and those who made it to the beach were greased, shaved, probed in every orifice, often branded with sizzling irons; I envisioned them being lashed and dragged toward the longboats, their spasms of screaming and clawing with their hands into the beach, biting up great choking mouthfuls of the sand in their desperation efforts for one last hold on the Africa that had been their home; I envisioned them shoved, beaten, jerked down into slave ships’ stinking holds and chained onto shelves, often packed so tightly that they had to lie on their sides like spoons in a drawer . . . .

My mind reeled with it all as we approached another, much larger village. Staring ahead, I realized that word of what had happened in Juffure must have left there well before I did. The driver slowing down, I could see this village’s people thronging the road ahead; they were waving, amid their cacophony of crying out something; I stood up in the Land-Rover, waving back as they seemed grudging to open a path for the Land-Rover.

I guess we had moved a third of the way through the village when it suddenly registered in my brain what they were all crying out ... the wizened, robed elders and younger men, the mothers and the naked tar-black children, they were all waving up at me, their expressions buoyant, beaming, all were crying out together, “Meester Kinte! Meester Kinte!”

Let me tell you something: I am a man. A sob hit me somewhere around my ankles; it came surging upward, and flinging my hands over my face, I was just bawling, as I hadn’t since I was a baby. “Meester Kinte!” I just felt like I was weeping for all of history’s incredible atrocities against fellowmen, which seems to be mankind’s greatest flaw . . . .

Flying homeward from Dakar, I decided to write a book. My own ancestors’ would automatically also be a symbolic saga of all African-descent people—who are without exception the seeds of someone like Kunta who was born and grew up in some black African village, someone who was captured and chained down in one of those slave ships that sailed them across the same ocean, into some succession of plantations, and since then a struggle for freedom.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Passage to India," by E.M. Forster.

But she did not take the disappointment as seriously as Miss Quested, for the reason that she was forty years older, and had learnt that Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually. 

A Marabar cave had been horrid as far as Mrs. Moore was concerned, for she had nearly fainted in it, and had some difficulty in preventing herself from saying so as soon as she got into the air again. It was natural enough: she had always suffered from faintness, and the cave had become too full, because all their retinue followed them. Crammed with villagers and servants, the circular chamber began to smell. She lost Aziz and Adela in the dark, didn’t know who touched her, couldn’t breathe, and some vile naked thing struck her face and settled on her mouth like a pad. She tried to regain the entrance tunnel, but an influx of villagers swept her back. She hit her head. For an instant she went mad, hitting and gasping like a fanatic. For not only did the crush and stench alarm her; there was also a terrifying echo.

I see you drag my best friend into the dirt, damage his health and ruin his prospects in a way you cannot conceive owing to your ignorance of our society and religion, and then suddenly you get up in the witness-box: ‘Oh no, Mr. McBryde, after all I am not quite sure, you may as well let him go.’ Am I mad? I keep asking myself. 

India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth-century sisterhood! Waddling in at this hour of the world to take her seat! She, whose only peer was the Holy Roman Empire, she shall rank with Guatemala and Belgium perhaps! Fielding mocked again. And Aziz in an awful rage danced this way and that, not knowing what to do, and cried: “Down with the English anyhow. That’s certain. Clear out, you fellows, double quick, I say. We may hate one another, but we hate you most. If I don’t make you go, Ahmed will, Karim will, if it’s fifty five-hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then”—he rode against him furiously—“and then,” he concluded, half kissing him, “you and I shall be friends.”

“Why can’t we be friends now?” said the other, holding him affectionately. “It’s what I want. It’s what you want.”

But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.”

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will," by Robert Sapolsky.

Thus, delayed maturation isn't inevitable, given the complexity of frontal construction, where the frontal cortex would develop faster, if only it could. Instead, the delay actively evolved, was selected for. If this is the brain region central to doing the right thing when it's the harder thing to do, no genes can specify what counts as the right thing. It has to be learned the long, hard way, by experience.

Where do these differences come from on a big-picture level? As discussed in the last chapter, East Asian collectivism is generally thought to arise from the communal work demands of floodplain rice farming. Recent Chinese immigrants to the United States already show the Western distinction between activating your ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) when thinking about yourself and activating it when thinking about your mother. This suggests that people back home who were more individualistic were the ones more likely to choose to emigrate, a mechanism of self-selection for these traits.

In the early 1990s, about a third of the soldiers deployed in the first Gulf War complained of being "never quite right again." with a constellation of symptoms - exhaustion, chronic unexplained pain, cognitive impairments. "Gulf War syndrome" was generally viewed as being some sort of psychological disorder, i.e. not for real, a marker of psychologically weak, self-indulgent veterans. And then science trickled in. Soldiers had been administered a heavy-duty class of drugs related to pesticides as protection against the nerve gas that Saddam Hussein was expected to use. While these drugs could readily explain the neurological features of Gulf War syndrome, this was discounted - careful research in the run-up to the war had identified what doses could be given safely, would not damage brain function. But then it turned out that the drugs became more damaging to the brain during stress, something that was not considered beforehand. One of the mechanisms implicated was that stress - in this case, body heat generated by carrying eighty pounds of great in 120-degree desert weather, coupled with basic combat terror - could open up the blood-brain barrier, increasing the amount of drug getting into the brain. It was not until 2008 that the Department of Veteran Affairs officially declared Gulf War syndrome to be a disease, not some psychological malingering.

We're at loggerheads. There's no such thing as free will, and blame and punishment are without any ethical justification. But we've evolved to find the right kind of punishment viscerally rewarding. This is hopeless.

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, by W. Chan Kim.

 

We observed that companies that break away from the competition pay little heed to matching or beating rivals or carving out a favorable competitive position. Their aim was not to outperform competitors. It was to offer a quantum leap in value that made the competition irrelevant. The focus on innovating at value, not positioning against competitors, drives companies to challenge all the factors an industry competes on and to not assume that just because the competition is doing something means it is connected to buyer value. 

In this way, blue ocean strategy makes sense of the strategic paradox many organizations face: the more they focus on coping with the competition, and striving to match and beat their advantages, the more they ironically tend to look like the competition. To which blue ocean strategy would respond, stop looking to the competition. Value-innovate and let the competition worry about you.

The key to tipping point leadership is concentration, not diffusion. Tipping point leadership builds on the rarely exploited corporate reality that in every organization, there are people, acts, and activities that exercise a disproportionate influence on performance. Hence, contrary to conventional wisdom, mounting a massive challenge is not about putting forth an equally massive response where performance gains are achieved by proportional investments in time and resources. Rather, it is about conserving resources and cutting time by focusing on identifying and then leveraging the factors of disproportionate influence in an organization.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "City of God," by Augustine.

 

I am certain of this, that no one has died who was not going to die at some time, and the end of life reduces the longest life to the same condition as the shortest. When something has once ceased to exist, there is no more question of better or worse, longer or shorter. What does it matter by what kind of death life is brought to an end? When man's life is ended he does not have to die again. Among the daily chances of this life every man on earth is threatened in the same way by innumerable deaths, and it is uncertain which of them will come to him. And so the question is whether it is better to suffer one in dying or to fear them all in living.

In embarking on this treatise on the City of God, I have thought it right to begin by replying to its enemies who, in their pursuit of earthly joys and their appetite for fleeting satisfactions, blame the Christian religion - the only religion of truth and salvation - if among these pleasures they find" any unhappiness; yet this unhappiness is imposed on them by God's mercy for their admonition, rather than by God's severity for their punishment.

Stupidity glories in never yielding to the force of truth; that is how it effects the ruin of anyone who is under the dominion of this monstrous moral fault. It is a disease proof against all efforts to treat it, not through any fault in the physician, but because the patient is himself incurable. 

 

Now the reign of death has held mankind in such utter subjection that they would all be driven headlong into that second death, which has no ending, as their well-deserved punishment, if some were not rescued from it by the undeserved grace of God. The result is that although there are many great peoples throughout the world, living under different customs in religion and morality and distinguished by a complex variety of languages, arms, and dress, it is still true that there have come into being only two main divisions, as we may call them, in human society: and we are justified in following the lead of our Scriptures and calling them two cities.There is, in fact, one city of men who choose to live by the standard of the flesh, another of those who choose to live by the standard of the spirit. The citizens of each of these desire their own kind of peace, and when they achieve their aim, that is the kind of peace in which they live.

We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self. In fact, the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord. The former looks for glory from men, the latter finds its highest glory in God, the witness of a good conscience. The earthly lifts up its head in its own glory, the Heavenly City says to its God: ‘My glory; you lift up my head.’ In the former, the lust for domination lords it over its princes as over the nations it subjugates; in the other both those put in authority and those subject to them serve one another in love, the rulers by their counsel, the subjects by obedience. The one city loves its own strength shown in its powerful leaders; the other says to its God, ‘I will love you, my Lord, my strength.’

Rome worshipped her founder as a god in a temple when she was already built and dedicated, while our Jerusalem placed its Founder and its God, Christ, in its foundation of faith to the end that it might be built and dedicated. The one city, loving its founder, put faith in him as a god; the other believing its founder to be God, gave her love to him. 

It was in bearing witness to this faith that the martyrs endured the bitter enmity and the savage cruelty of the world; and they overcome the world not by resisting but by dying. For this faith they died; and they can now obtain these blessings from the Lord, for whose name they were slain.

It follows that what is needed for the soul’s life of bliss is not the escape from any kind of body but the possession of an imperishable body. And what imperishable body could be more fitting for their joy than the body in which, then it was perishable, they endured their sorrow? For in that condition they will not experience that ‘dread lust’ of which Virgil (following Plato) speaks, that makes them ‘once more desire to take a mortal body.’ I mean that in this state they will feel no desire to return to a mortal body, when they will possess the body to which they desire to return, and possess it in a way as never to relinquish that possession, never to be parted from that body by any death even for a brief moment.

 

The important thing is that the seventh will be our Sabbath, whose end will not be an evening, but the Lord’s Day, an eighth day, as it were, which is to last for ever, a day consecrated by the resurrection of Christ, foreshadowing the eternal rest not only of the spirit but of the body also. There we shall be still and see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise. Behold what will be, in the end, without end, For what is our end but to reach that kingdom which has no end?

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 482

 

 

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success," by Carol Dweck.

 

Jim Marshall, former defensive player for the Minnesota Vikings, relates what could easily have made him into a failure. In a game against the San Francisco 49ers, Marshall spotted the football on the ground. He scooped it up and ran for a touchdown as the crowd cheered. But he ran the wrong way. He scored for the wrong team and on national television. 

It was the most devastating moment of his life. The shame was overpowering. But during halftime, he thought, “If you make a mistake, you got to make it right. I realized I had a choice. I could sit in my misery or I could do something about it.” Pulling himself together for the second half, he played some of his best football ever and contributed to his team’s victory. 

Nor did he stop there. He spoke to groups. He answered letters that poured in from people who finally had the courage to admit their own shameful experiences. He heightened his concentration during games. Instead of letting the experience define him, he took control of it. He used it to become a better player and, he believes, a better person.

A remarkable thing I’ve learned from my research is that in the growth mindset, you don’t always need confidence. What I mean is that even when you think you’re not good at something, you can still plunge into it wholeheartedly and stick to it. Actually, sometimes you plunge into something because you’re not good at it. This is a wonderful feature of the growth mindset. You don’t have to think you’re already great at something to want to do it and to enjoy doing it.