Wisdom, Leadership & Success

Life moves quickly. Work. School. Kids. Travel ball teams. Friends. Social media. Keeping up with pop culture and the latest Netflix series. You’ve got to have the right job that combines social consciousness and financial reward. All while saving the environment and being politically conscious and staying in great shape and finding time for yoga or meditation so you’re not too anxious or stressed or depressed. And don’t forget to post the latest vacation on Instagram to show everyone else your life is great and you’re keeping up with social expectations. It’s exhausting. It can drive you to burnout. The thing is, most of these are just a blur of relatively unimportant distractions in life. How do you exit this crazy, out-of-control carnival ride? The answer is to simplify and focus on the fundamentals. The fundamental is relationship. Love. That’s it for everything in life. How does that work? The meaning of life—your purpose in life—is Happiness. Happiness doesn’t come from money or social status or education or having your kids at an elite college. Happiness comes from high-quality relationships. Period. Whether it’s your family or work or friends, high-quality relationships are the highest performing relationships because they are based in deep trust and love. The secret to winning in business? Focus on relationships instead of profits. Develop good, high-trust relationships with your customers and they will bring you their business. Develop good, high-trust relationships with your team and you will maximize their engagement and productivity. The combination of good customer relationships and good team relationships will maximize your performance—your profits—which you can then use to benefit your team. Great relationships drive profits better than a focus on profits. It’s all about relationship. The secret to a great family? Relationships. A great relationship with your spouse is the best way for your kids to learn that good relationships are the key to success and Happiness in life. Teach your children that to have great relationships with others, they must first be in a good relationship with themselves. Childhood and adolescence are the story of your kids discovering, loving and leading themselves so they can be strong in their future relationships with family, work and friends. Our society is totally dependent on good, high-trust relationships between each other and with our justice, financial, political, health, education, etc. systems. When the trust breaks down in those relationships, society unravels. The word society itself comes from the Latin socius which means companion. It’s all about relationship. Picking up on the pattern here? Personal success, family success, friendship success, work success and Happiness in life are all tied to one thing: relationship. We’re surrounded by examples of the importance of relationship. More than half of the hit songs are love songs. Relationship. How do you feel when you are with someone you love? Relationship. How do you feel when you lose someone you love? Relationship. Why do people suffer so much in solitary confinement in prison? Because you deprive them of relationship. What’s the worst way to bully someone? It’s not yelling at them. It’s shunning them. Depriving them of relationship. In ancient societies, exile was worse than death because you deprived the person of relationship with their clan and their own identity. If you give infants all the food and water they need but deprive them of love and affection, four out of ten will die. Love and affection are more important for survival than food and water. More than half the surviving infants will have deep psychological challenges. Why? Because love and affection help form our neurological pathways. When the affection doesn’t happen, the neural pathways get mis-wired. It’s all about relationship. As humans,

Not long ago, a group of friends of mine were having an email discussion about a problem facing our nation at the time. They’re all good, well-intentioned and successful people. We all agreed that a certain behavior was deeply wrong, but we had deep disagreements about the nature of the problem and the best solution to fix that problem. The email exchange got spirited. At one point, one of the participants said that if you didn’t understand the injustice his way and you didn’t agree with his solution, you were guilty of participating in the injustice yourself. Take a second to think about that. If you don’t agree with me,  you’re guilty of the evil behavior yourself. I brought this up in a discussion with some millennials and iGens I know, and they nodded their heads knowingly. “It gets worse than that,” they said. “Not only are you evil if you don’t see things my way, but if you aren’t taking action on all the problems in the world right now, you’re a bad person.” You’re not a good person because you stopped using plastic straws. You can only be a good person if you don’t use straws and eat the right foods from the right farms and boycott products from certain companies and countries and solve homelessness in your town and post social media support for certain movements in certain overseas nations and oppose this policy and care about that species and, and, and…. (insert a list of at least a hundred other things). In earlier times, society used college and the media to help people understand Beauty and Truth and Morality so that people could practice and seek those things in life. Learning about Beauty and Truth and Morality made us aware of the injustices and problems in life, and we worked together to fix them. It was a positive view of life that brought hope, built relationships and Happiness, and solved problems. That positive understanding of life has worked pretty well. We forget that the problems humanity faced for thousands of years—deep hunger and poverty, rampant disease, early death—were much worse in the past than today. We forget the enormous progress we’ve made in very challenging times. Today, we have more wealth, education and technology than any time in human history. We live better and longer. We’ve made enormous progress addressing hunger, disease and shelter. Yet, through the postmodern thinking that dominates colleges and the media today, we’ve taught our younger generations to see the world and life only in terms of radical injustice and power. We’ve taught them that there is very little good going on in our society. Life is dominated by injustice and evil. You are either a victim suffering injustice or an oppressor imposing injustice. There is no meaning or purpose. Love is a lie. Society is irredeemable. Life is hopeless and dystopian. If you’re not buying and boycotting all the right things… If you’re not working at a job that actively solves injustices… If you’re not attending all of the protests about all the important issues (by the way, they’re all important)… If you’re not spending all your time on the Internet railing against injustice and attacking bad people… Then you don’t care and you are a really bad person. As one millennial put it: “We’ve been told that the world is full of injustice and that we are supposed to solve all of it. We’re supposed to care about every issue we’re told about. If we don’t take action, that means we don’t care and we’re a bad person. But there are so many injustices and we can’t solve them all and its overwhelming and exhausting.” We have used college and the media to overwhelm millennials and iGens with injustice, then we psychologically bully them, bending them to our will, our issues and our solutions. Some in older generations may be ok with that. They think it’s just the price of their version of justice. But it’s killing those in younger generations.

If you are like many people, when you saw the title Why Faith is Critical to Your Business Success, you probably got uncomfortable. We’re not supposed to talk about faith and business together. We’ve been taught to see life segregated into two different areas: your public/work life versus your personal/private life. Work and business go on public side. Faith goes on the private side. You shouldn’t bring your faith to work, right? Wrong. You definitely need to be careful about how you bring your religion to work, but your work success is directly dependent on faith. In fact, all aspects of your life depend directly on faith. Understanding Faith Faith is another way of saying trust. Faith is another way of saying confidence. In fact, the word confidence comes from pairing the prefix con which means with (remember your Spanish classes?) and fide which means faith. Confidence means with faith. When you say that you have confidence in someone you are saying that you have faith in them Fidelity means that you keep the faith with another. When a person cheats on their spouse, they commit an infidelity. The Marine Corps motto is Semper Fidelis. Always faithful. The word trust comes Old Norse meaning strength. How much trust, how much strength, is there in your relationship with your spouse, friend or business partner? You make thousands of acts of faith every day. You have faith that your alarm clock will wake you at the right time. You have faith that your money in your bank account is still there. You have faith that flipping the light switch won’t electrocute you, that the water you drink isn’t poisonous and that people you don’t know will stay in their lane on the highway. Without those thousands of acts of faith each day, you couldn’t function. Our society would collapse. Countries where people have strong faith in their justice, banking and political systems do well. When people doubt fundamental systems, bad things happen. Faith should never be based in blindness or ignorance. The best faith is always be based in evidence—like previous experience. I have faith that I won’t get electrocuted flipping the light switch because I’ve done it hundreds of thousands of times and I’m still alive. I have faith in my auto mechanic because he’s always been honest with me in the past. Faith and Work Your business is based on faith. Do you have faith that your people do the things you ask them to do? Do you have faith your clients will pay you? Do you have faith that your team is fully committed to each other and the goals? What happens to your personal and team performance when you lose faith in your managers, your team, or your clients, bank or suppliers? When we lose faith, we hedge. We don’t fully commit. We spend time and energy on backup plans. Performance drops. Anxiety skyrockets. Google’s research on high-performance teams shows that trust—faith—is the key factor in team performance. Faith is more important than talent. Faith is critical for business success, family success, and success in your relationships with yourself and your friends. Why Use the Word Faith? Okay, so why talk about faith—which some people mistakenly take to mean blind religious faith—when we can use the word trust? Why use a word with potential negative baggage when we can use a word that doesn’t have that baggage? Two big reasons. First, the word trust has become so familiar that we use it without thinking much about what it means or how important it is in life. We take it for granted. It has lost its impact. Using the word faith makes us think about trust in new, more powerful ways. It can remind us that faith in ourselves and each other is one of the 2 or 3 most important things in life. Faith is about the strength of relationship. Remember, strong relationships don’t just give you high-performance teams, families and friends. As we’ve discussed in earlier blogs, high-quality,

The college admissions cheating scandal is filling the news lately. I led a college prep high school for 14 years and put three daughters through college myself, so I’ve got some experience in that admissions game. Yes, the college admissions scandal is about cheating. Yes, the college admissions scandal is about wealthy people having a big advantage over 90% of American families trying to get into elite colleges. But these are really just symptoms of a deeper and more important problem: our society’s relentless pursuit of Unhappiness. We are teaching our kids to chase shiny things like status, money, being a starting player on the best travel ball team, getting the most followers on social media, wearing the right brands… And getting into elite colleges. We teach our kids to chase these things not because our children will develop into their best self, but because it is socially prestigious. It’s an indicator that our kids are “successful”. It’s an indicator that we are “successful” parents. That’s the deeper, more important problem. Chasing shiny things in life is making our kids depressed and killing them. How bad is it? Suicide is the second leading cause of death for people ages 10 to 34. The rate of depression among young people increased 63% from 2009 to 2017. 40% of college kids in spring 2017 said they experienced depression so deep it was difficult for them to function. Those are statistics. Go read the article, How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Peterson to get a feel for what we’re setting our kids up for. The author is a 34-year-old “successful” millennial who has spent her life chasing what she’s been told to chase, and she is burned out. Miserable. Deeply unhappy. Read the article and feel her pain. The article resonates with young people because it captures their life experience. They’ve chased everything we’ve told them to chase and they are burned out. Miserable. Deeply unhappy. Here’s what is most surprising: In 8,000 words about life, the millennial author never mentions the word Happiness. Never mentions relationship. Never talks about fulfillment in life. It’s like no one ever told her that life is about Happiness. It doesn’t seem to be in her frame of reference. We have more education and wealth than ever in human history, yet the suicide and depression rates are skyrocketing. We’re quite literally teaching our kids to chase shiny things in life that destroy them psychologically, spiritually and physically. All in the name of attending the elite academic or athletic school. All in the chase for shiny things that we call “success”. All in a relentless pursuit of Unhappiness. What’s the answer? We need to teach our kids the real meaning of life—Happiness—and how to pursue it. This week I visited my friend, Dave, who just had a tumor removed from his brain. He showed me what looked like a hundred staples running across his head. Fortunately, the tumor was benign. When he was diagnosed, hundreds of friends came to visit. While he was in surgery, more than 60 people gathered and prayed for him at the hospital. His family, friends, partners and employees were all behind him because they love him. Dave told me he was ok if the tumor was malignant because he knew that life and Happiness are all about good relationships—with yourself, with your friends and family, and with your Creator. Dave has those relationships. Dave is facing a deep life-challenge, and he’s never been more fulfilled. There’s an 80-year ongoing Harvard Study on Adult Development that backs him on that. It’s very clear: Happiness does not come from money or power or status or education. Happiness comes from high-quality relationships. Period. Our society profoundly misses that Truth about Happiness and life. You can’t win by swimming against the societal rip-tide. It’s too powerful. But you can swim out the side of the rip-tide.

A recent Wall Street Journal article, The Tech Whiz Behind Vine and HQ Trivia, tells the story of Colin Kroll. Professional Success Colin was a young, self-taught computer programmer who left Detroit In 2007 to go to New York City and do app coding. He worked 12-hour days at the office and did more work at home. Eventually, Kroll found backers who funded a video app called Vine. You’ve heard of it. Vine was an app that allowed people to publish 6 second videos that looped. It was a big hit on the Internet. Twitter bought Vine in 2012. Kroll was 28 years old and a multimillionaire. Those around Kroll through the years always said that he was very smart. Investors backed Kroll in another Internet project—HQ Trivia—that became another Internet hit in 2018. In terms of money and recognition for his professional skills, Colin Kroll was doing very well. He was the CEO of Intermedia Labs, the company that owned HQ Trivia. He was buying homes. He had a Porsche. He had a $75,000 credit card bill. Kroll had told one of his advisors, “I’m never worried about making more money…” Tragedy Just two months ago, on December 15, 2018, Colin Kroll was found dead in his apartment. He was 34 years old. Kroll spent the night before talking with his employees at his company’s holiday party. The next day he was dead. More of the Story Of course, there is more to the story. It is not a new story. It is a very human story that has lessons for all of us. Colin Kroll was smart. In high school, he used his software coding skills to kick his neighbors off the Internet so he could get more internet cable bandwidth. He regularly got high on pot and prescription drugs. When he moved to New York City he “worked incessantly” and smoked almost two packs of cigarettes a day. He smoked pot, “occasionally did cocaine” and drank heavily. Kroll tried to reset his life in 2018. He quit smoking and began to exercise more. Despite those changes, Colin Kroll died last December 15th from an accidental overdose of heroin that was laced with fentanyl. It might be tempting to write Colin Kroll’s death off as just another example of the dangers of drug use. But a lot more was going on. Relationships The Wall Street Journal article talks a lot about Kroll’s relationships with others. In fact, the article spends more time talking about his relationships than his drug use. According to friends, Colin Kroll was gentle and endearing. They said that Kroll identified with people who were misfits in life. To many of those he worked with, Kroll was abrasive. He told a mentor, “Everyone thinks I’m an asshole, and I am an asshole, but I can’t help it because everyone around me is so stupid.” A partner in one of his companies quit over Kroll’s abrasive behavior. Employees complained that Kroll lashed out at them, that he was moody and that he created a hostile work environment. Articles published about Kroll described him as hard to work with and told stories about women quitting because they found Kroll creepy. Colin Kroll was imaginative and skilled at work, but he wasn’t very good at relationships. Lessons from the Death of Colin Kroll So, what are some of the lessons we can learn about life from Colin Kroll? Besides the dangers of fentanyl-laced heroin? We can learn the important difference between knowledge and wisdom. We can learn why our society’s focus on education instead of formation is failing our young people and our society. And we can learn more about the importance of relationships in life. Wisdom over Knowledge Knowledge is defined as the “facts, information and skills acquired by a person through experience or education.” Knowledge is “the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.” Knowledge is a good thing. It is literally about what you know. But knowledge and wisdom aren’t the same thing. Wisdom is more than knowledge. Wisdom is the combination of knowledge plus character.

Marine Corps Officer Candidate School Way back in the summer of 1985, I spent my June and July in a special kind of hell called Marine Corps Officer Candidates School—Marine OCS. Most people, when they hear the word “school”, think that Marine Officer Candidate School would be a place where you learned how to be an officer in the Marine Corps. Nothing could be further from the truth. Marine OCS was all about putting you under a tremendous amount of physical, mental and emotional pressure to see if you could make good decisions and lead people while tired and stressed. I remember getting called into the drill instructor’s office (called is the polite word) as part of a group getting commendations for scoring high on the Marine physical fitness test. That lasted about 15 seconds. Then they yelled at us to get out. As I ran back to my rack, I heard my name yelled again. I ran back into the drill instructor’s office as part of a second group—many of whom were in the first group—just in time to get a counseling form for poor performance on the physical fitness test. Pushing Through Failure That was the theme. They put you in no-win situations or gave you tasks with timelines you couldn’t possibly meet, made you encounter failure face-to-face, made you experience failure at your core, then watched to see if you fought through it. Or gave up. They weren’t worried about being fair to us. They were focused on one question: Can we trust you to lead our beloved Marines in very stressful situations? The OCS experience made you dig deep into yourself. OCS made you encounter yourself—your good and your bad—in straightforward, sometimes harsh ways. It forced you to face your relationship with yourself. Happiness is About Relationships From our earlier podcasts, we know that the key to Happiness in life is not money or status or education. An 80-year Harvard study confirms that the key to Happiness in life is high-quality relationships. If you have high-quality relationships, you’ll not only be happier; you’ll also be healthier and live longer. So where do we have relationships in life? Those are the areas where we should focus our lives for Happiness. The answer is simple. There are six areas of relationship in life. There is your relationship with yourself, your family, your friends, your relationships at work, as a citizen in your community and with the Creator. Six areas of opportunity to pursue Happiness. In this podcast we’ll discuss some basics about relationships, then we’ll talk about a critical relationship—the relationship you have with yourself. Your Relationships Are Only As Good As You Are The idea of relationship seems obvious, but we can learn some important things from unpacking the concept. Relationship is fundamental in our lives, with the most important relationship being the one you have with yourself. One of fundamental things that defines you as a human being is that you are self-conscious—that you are in relationship with yourself. Our relationships with others can only be as good as we are in the relationship. Think of relationship like a bridge. By its nature, a bridge must have at least two anchor points—one on each side of the span. Two strong anchor points makes the bridge—the relationship—strong. If one of the anchor points is weak, the bridge—the relationship—will be unstable and weak as well. In fact, a bridge is only as strong as its weakest anchor point. In the same way, if you are a good person and a strong anchor point, you will have stronger relationships. If you are weak or unsettled, your relationships will suffer. Your relationships can only be as good as you are. Relationships and Trust Relationship is also an act of faith, of trust, in the other. Your relationships are only going to be as strong as the confidence you have in each other. When you have trust in the other, you can focus your attention on moving forward.

Tragedy, Unhappiness and Burnout This week I read an article about a 27-year old young woman who hanged herself in her New York apartment. She left her mother apology notes online and in her apartment that read she “felt absolutely nothing during what should have been the happiest and darkest times in my life.” The notes continue, “I realize I am undeserving of thinking this way because I truly have a great life on paper. I’m fortunate to eat meals most can only imagine. I often travel freely without restriction… However all these facets seem trivial to me…” And she writes, “It’s the ultimate first world problem, I get it. I often felt detached while in a room full of my favorite people…” In my blog a couple of weeks ago, Millennials: Pursuing Happiness and Avoiding Burnout, I  talked about an article by Anne Helen Petersen that describes how millennials are feeling not just exhausted, but burned out chasing all the things they’ve been told to chase in life. It was revealing that in almost 8.000 words about life, Petersen never mentioned Happiness or fulfillment or even relationships. Petersen concluded her article basically settling for being more aware of her burnout and attempting to seek some joy in life. The Fundamental Problem: We Don't Know Happiness I think these two stories capture a fundamental problem in our nation. We have more education, more wealth, better health, more travel and more prosperity than ever in history, and yet so many—especially younger people—seem sad, depressed or lack direction. We need to fix that. We need to understand our meaning and purpose in life so that we can pursue and find fulfillment and Happiness. When we tap into that fundamental Truth about ourselves, we will be in the best position possible to be successful in all areas of our lives. So, let’s be obvious about it. The meaning of life and your purpose in life are straightforward. The answer is Happiness. Based on Petersen’s millennial article, it seems like we forgot to tell tens of millions of people that life is about Happiness. And we seem to have forgotten how to pursue Happiness. Instead, we’ve become thoroughly captured and enthralled by shiny distractions in life. We’re chasing dozens of all the wrong things in life like social status and money, and stuff like the coolest cars and most expensive houses and newest smartphones and the most prestigious schools and travel sports teams. I’m not saying that its bad to be rich or to appreciate beautiful things. These are all good things that can make our lives better. But they are not the meaning of life. They can provide short-term pleasure, but they can never provide long-term fulfillment. If you make the pursuit of these things for their own sake the focus of your life, you will inevitably find yourself in pain, unhappy and unfulfilled. Meaning of Life: Happiness & Relationship So, this is the first in a series of blog posts where we will talk about the purpose and meaning of your life—Happiness—and how you can pursue it. We’ll take the best ancient, timeless wisdom and apply it to our current times and circumstances. We’ll talk about some simple lessons that you can use to become successful and fulfilled in every area of your life—your personal life, your family life,  and your life with your friends and at your work. Let’s talk about your life, your Happiness and your success. Let’s make it simple and easy to understand so you can apply it all areas of your life. So you can hand the Truth about Happiness and success to your own children. Let’s start with Happiness itself. We’ll define Happiness generally as a way of life that brings you deep contentment, satisfaction and lasting joy. So, if Happiness is not about money or status or fame, where do you find it? As we talked about in an earlier blog, Meaning of Life: Happiness, you find Happiness in high-quality relationships. That’s not my opinion.

Attacking the Bad and Stupid People So, America, are we pissed off at each other enough yet? It is seductive and easy to get pissed off at bad people. Stupid people. You know the ones. The idiots out there on the other side. The fake news ones. They are ignorant. Selfish. Hateful. They deserve whatever bad things happen to them. Doesn’t it feel good to be righteous? To defend your truth? To fight for something you believe in?  To tolerate the good stuff and be virtuously intolerant of what they’re doing? Doesn’t it feel good to attack and denounce the bad and the stupid? Pat yourself on the back for making another tweet or Facebook post that points out their stupidity and evil with a witty and nasty retort. We need to stop. We need to stop this incessant, mean-spirited attacking of others. The attacks are stupid and self-destructive. Our attacks destroy our ability to live together as Americans; they threaten our own national security; and the more we attack each other the more it changes us—you and me—into ugly and mean-spirited people. None of this attacking helps us achieve success and happiness as individuals or as an American nation. Let’s stop. Bad Faith, Prejudice and Bigotry Think about it. Most of our attacks start with the presumption that our opponent is bad and stupid. That’s why we are attacking them. We’ve probably never met the other person. We just know that they are bad because of their race or class or job or their pussy hat or MAGA hat or where they live or their political thoughts. And that justifies being mean to them. We don’t really know them, but we’re willing to pre-judge and attack them based on their race or class or whatever. That’s prejudice. We make no effort to know or understand them before we attack. We don’t listen to what they say in good-faith to understand them. Nope. Instead, we interpret everything they say in the worst possible way so we can have another opportunity to attack. Our attacks are in bad faith and prejudiced. That makes us bigots too. When another is that bad and stupid, they aren’t a real person. Or at least they don’t deserve to be treated like a person. They are evil. They are demons. And so, they should be treated like demons. Demonizing Others Destroys Us But demonizing “others”, treating them like things, not people, has a long history of turning into truly evil situations like genocide, slavery, internment and mob lynchings. When you dehumanize others in your attacks, you begin a walk down a very dangerous path. There’s more. Attacking and demonizing others destroys your ability to develop good relationships with other people. It divides us deeply and emotionally. It poisons future opportunities for a relationship with that person or those people. We lose the ability to come together as a community or nation to solve problems. That makes life much harder for everyone. Demonizing others can destroy our own family and friendships. When we attack, we can find ourselves throwing away decades of friendship over a disagreement on some election. And perhaps most important, when we are mean to others, when we attack and demonize them, we change ourselves. We become what we do, what we practice. It becomes a habit. It becomes part of our character, of who we are. We become mean-spirited, hateful people. Every time we demonize another person we take another step on a path to mean-spiritedness and hatefulness. That meanness will inevitably seep into other aspects of our lives. We know from an earlier blog that Happiness in life is all about high-quality relationships with other people. We know that work success depends on having great relationships with our clients and our co-workers. Happiness and success—everyone wants that, right? Well, demonizing others destroys our Happiness and success by destroying our ability to have high-quality, high-performance relationships. Demonizing others poisons the trust needed for...

Last week a writer from the millennial generation, Anne Helen Petersen, published an essay, “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation”. My millennial daughter recommended it to me. She said Petersen’s article captured the way she and many in her age group feel about life. Petersen’s article is a good read that captures the real pain—the burnout—that millennials are feeling today. Before any conservatives out there automatically dismiss her article because it’s on the liberal Buzzfeed website, just read and actively listen to the experience she describes. There is a lot to learn. Baby Boomers and GenX people may be tempted to dismiss Petersen’s work as millennial whining. Don’t. The burnout she talks about is real. This is not whining. The pain is being experienced by many in her generation. I think Petersen has done a very good job of describing that pain and grounding it in good stories and examples. We need to listen because we care about our millennials and because her article can provide us some important insights and lessons about life. Millennial burnout is telling us that something is off the tracks. We need to fix that. I’ll give a synopsis, but make sure you read Petersen’s article. It is long and well-worth the time spent. You need to feel the burnout through her writing. It’s the burnout of a generation. Synopsis The article begins by describing the burnout in terms of having to chase endless items on to do lists. This endless chase is exhausting and eventually paralyzing. Petersen was doing the important, even difficult tasks, “But when it came to the mundane, the medium priority, the stuff that wouldn’t make my job any easier or work better, I avoided it.” Through the rest of her piece, Petersen describes what she believes are the cause and history of the burnout. Much of it is about how Petersen believes millennials were optimized by their parents to win in life. They weren’t allowed the dangerous activities of previous generations like playground jungle gyms or riding bikes without helmets. No teeter-totters or BB guns. Unstructured play became play dates. Unchanneled energy got medicated. Intensive parenting. Moms who became momma-bears and over-protected their kids. And then there were the expectations. Petersen says, “Those expectations encapsulate the millennial rearing project, in which students internalize the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all of this childhood optimization: doing work that you’re passionate about . Whether that job is as a professional sports player, a Patagonia social media manager, a programmer at a startup, or a partner at a law firm seems to matter less than checking all of those boxes.” Petersen and millennials clearly think meeting those expectations is increasingly hard or impossible. They are loaded with college debt.  Many had to live with their parents after college graduation. As she says: "It’s also about the psychological toll of realizing that something you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be “worth it” — worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization — isn’t ." And social media makes it worse. Petersen says: "One thing that makes that realization sting even more is watching others live their seemingly cool, passionate, worthwhile lives online. We all know what we see on Facebook or Instagram isn’t “real,” but that doesn’t mean we don’t judge ourselves against it . I find that millennials are far less jealous of objects or belongings on social media than the holistic experiences represented there, the sort of thing that prompts people to comment, I want your life. That enviable mix of leisure and travel, the accumulation of pets and children,

Peggy Noonan and Magic Ponies... A few weeks ago, I made a quick post about a column by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal about Americans—that’s you and me—and politics and “magic ponies.” With a new Congress coming in and the 2020 election already starting, it made sense to go into greater depth on this issue. Noonan argues that Americans are voting for “magic ponies” like Trump and Obama based too much on emotion and not enough on their experience and judgment. She is correct. That failure to vote for wisdom and experience is a symptom of a much deeper and more threatening problem facing America. Facing us. Facing you and me. And that problem is us. The problem is you and me. America is United by Ideals, Not Blood or Ethnicity Almost all nations in world history are grounded in ethnicity or tribe. You are Japanese because you are born Japanese. You are Tutsi because you were born in the Tutsi tribe. In these nations, the people look to the rulers, the government, to solve their problems because those are the people who rule the nation or tribe. Its what they’ve been doing from the beginning. They are citizen-subjects of their ruling government America is different. We are not united by blood or ethnicity. We are united by commitment to the American ideals expressed in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. In the American military and in our citizenship oath, we don’t swear allegiance to a king or ruler. We swear allegiance to “support and defend the Constitution.” Citizen-Leaders Not Citizen-Subjects Our politicians are not the leaders of America. We The People–you and me–are the defined leaders of America. We are not citizen-subjects of the government. We are citizen-leaders in our own nation. That citizen-leadership goes way beyond the government. Through most of our history, We the People solved most of our problems using private associations. We formed non-profits, private associations and charities to tackle challenges like health care, education, homelessness and many other problems. Tackling problems as private citizen-leaders does several important things. When we help others directly, we develop our own character, compassion and sense of community. All these are keys to Happiness in life. When we are the leaders solving problems, we take ownership of the problems, investing ourselves in solving those problems. As citizen-leaders working through private associations, we solve problems more effectively, efficiently and with better response than the government can. Finally, Americans have always been wary of a federal government that gains too much power and becomes tyrannical. Our Constitution is written to have three co-equal branches of federal government. The branches exercise checks and balances over each other, preventing any one branch from having too much power. That is designed to keep the federal government itself from having too much power and becoming tyrannical. When we tackle problems ourselves, as citizen-leaders, we keep the power with the people, not the government. We prevent tyranny and maintain our freedom. In his famous 1830’s book, Democracy in America, Alexis De Tocqueville tours America and notes this fundamental difference between America and Europe. In Europe, citizen-subjects are dependent on the ruling class and government to lead and do things for them. In contrast, Americans take leadership onto themselves, forming associations with other Americans to accomplish things. Our Failure as Citizen-Leaders Today, We the People, you and I, are failing as citizen-leaders in at least two ways. First, as citizen-leaders, we are responsible for choosing the best representatives possible to manage our government day-to-day. Nevertheless, the media is filled with complaints about our government from all sides. We seem to be very unhappy with the representatives we choose. The problem is,