Note: The following essay is an excerpt from the upcoming new and revised edition of Ready, Fire, Aim. 

Tribal Dynamics in Business 

 “The person who knows HOW will always have a job. The person who knows WHY will always be his boss.” – Alanis Morissette

When a start-up business grows, problems arise. Many entrepreneurs believe they can solve them by hiring additional people to deal with them. Sometimes that works. Often it doesn’t.

There are invisible challenges that come with a growing employee base – challenges that can hobble communication, reduce cash flow, and threaten profits. But if you understand the natural stages of entrepreneurial growth, you can anticipate and manage such challenges before they damage your business.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell looked at several anthropological studies of primitive societies that showed an interesting pattern. When tribes grew to more than 30 members, they tended to split into two smaller tribes, each with its own leader that was loyal to the original chieftain. One split into two. Two split into four. The smaller tribes were able to live and work together under the chieftain until the total size of the group exceeded about 150 individuals.

At that point, the unity of leadership broke down.

The researchers explained it this way: With no more than 30 tribe members, the chieftain has direct control over every one of them. When the group grows from 30 to 150, he can still exert significant influence over the entire group by communicating directly with his subordinates – the leaders of each smaller tribe. He maintins conrtol over the 150, but at a single degree of separation.

Once the group exceeds 150 tribe members, there is an additional degree of separation. The tribe leaders (and their followers) that report directly to him are still loyal to him. But the next level of leadership is now separated from him by three degrees. And their followers have little to no allegiance to him.

Contemporary research shows that a similar connection exists in the modern workplace. At three degrees of separation, communication breaks down.

There’s also some related research suggesting that there is an optimal number of employees that any executive can effectively manage: about six to eight.

When I first read about those studies, I was intrigued but doubtful. I was running a business that had about 300 employees. I felt sure that I was effectively managing them all. But when I took a closer look at what was actually going on, I had to admit that I was managing only six or seven people. And that I could identify, by name, fewer than 150 of our employees.

The more I observed, the more obvious it was that I was managing within that same ancient, tribal hierarchy. The success we were having was the result of making the connections between each level of leadership work. The failures we were experiencing were the result of broken links down the line of command, communication, and supervision.

Keeping on Top of the Expanding Hierarchy 

In a typical start-up business, the founder hires a handful of people to help him get it off the ground. There are seldom strict job descriptions or formal titles. Everyone is expected to do whatever needs to be done to move the company forward.

As the business grows, some sort of division of labor takes place. The founder puts one person charge of sales and marketing, another in charge of research and development, another in charge of production, another in charge of customer service, and so on.

At this point, the business may have, say, 50 employees. The founder feels no need to “manage” all 50 of them. He trusts his original team members to do that.

Although most of the employees do not report to him, he knows who these people are because he interacts with them – casually, perhaps – almost every week. These second-tier employees understand what their managers want, but they also understand what he wants. They have a sense of how he wants the business to grow. The smart ones can satisfy their own managers’ goals and also cater, in some way, to his ambitions.

But the business keeps growing. The marketing guy hires an SEO expert and a direct-response whiz. The sales gal hires six hungry salespeople. The guy in charge of customer service hires 12 reps to handle the increased volume of sales. Before long, the business has 100 or 150 employees, and some things are not running as smoothly as they were before.

Communication between the founder and his original team is still as close as it ever was. And the 40 to 50 employees that report to them are still working towards his overall agenda. But the other 50 to 100 employees have no idea what his ideas are. They rarely speak to him. They hardly know him at all.

By the time these third-tier employees move into management positions and start hiring and managing their own next-tier employees, there’s a good chance that they will be passing on their own, not the founder’s, core beliefs.

And if this continues unchecked, by the time the company has several hundred employees the “company culture” that was established by the founder is all but a distant memory.

This is not always a bad thing. If the founder is smart enough to hire superstars – smart, hardworking people that hire more superstars and pass down his ideas clearly and faithfully to them – the business can grow quickly and safely. But that is not the natural pattern of business growth. The natural pattern is entropy: starting with clarity and comprehension and then degrading into confusion and chaos.

There are traditional ways to curtail this sort of degeneration – procedures and protocols that are practiced in most large businesses and no doubt taught in most business schools. I’m referring to meetings and memos, reports and charts, training programs and employee manuals, retreats and seminars, and so on.

If you are a natural-born entrepreneur, you will loathe such solutions, as I did. But if you ignore them completely, I’m sorry to say, you will regret it.

I have spent my entire career rebuffing every effort to corportize every business I owned or ran or consulted with. And though I have had to concede that these remote-control management methods become to some extent necessary as a business grows, none of them can solve the problems caused by growth if the founder is not aware of the damage they do.

Corporate management is inherently anti-growth because it is designed for control. You cannot simply hire corporate managers and let them do what they’ve been trained to do. They will suck the marrow out of your business. They will solve the problems caused by growth by regulating, monitoring, measuring, and systemitizing everything they can get their hands on.

Of course, this is not true for every corporate manager. It is true only for nine out of 10.

So what can you do?

I don’t think you’ll find an answer in the Harvard Business Review. (I’ve been reading it for years and I haven’t seen one there.)

I’ll tell you what I have done.

First and foremost, I stay keenly aware of the primary objective of the business depending on its stage of growth. If it is proliferating products or advertising campaigns, I make sure that everyone that reports to me understands that his job is to support that primary objective, not to build out his domain in some way that suits his particular dreams.

Second, while obeying Pareto’s 80/20 Principle and giving 80% of my time and attention to the business’s primary challenge, I take responsibity for everything else.

If the business is in Stage One or Stage Two, I push hardest on cash flow and sales growth and product development. But I do not ignore or in any way denigrate operations and fulfillment and customer service and accounting. I make it clear to those that are running those departments that I expect excellence from them. I warn them that my lack of attention does not mean I don’t care what they are doing. On the contrary, I tell them, their jobs are vital to the business, and their responsibility to run those departments well is heightened by my lack of attention. I tell them that when we meet (usually once a month), I expect them to show me good numbers and be able to answer, with precision, any questions I have.

Meanwhile, no matter how strong those numbers are, I assume that their operations are falling apart, even when I have no reason to think so. I’ve been fooled before by slick reporting and positive presentations – and paid the price.

This is my personal approach. But it is based on the fact that, as I said, the natural pattern of business growth is entropy. It is nothing more or less than acknowledging that growth will always cause chaos, and that unless you constantly and continuously exert energy against chaos, entropy will out.

In other words, I obey Pareto’s Principle in my dealings with the top one or two priorities of the business at whatever stage it’s in… and I adhere to Murphy’s Law for everything else.

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“Don’t expect others to listen to what you have to say unless what you have to say is interesting to others.” – Michael Masterson

If You’re Trying to Impress Me, Don’t Do This

He had been strongly recommended for the job. And so I was expecting a sharp, take-charge person. Instead, when I took his call, I got this:

“I’ve been involved in strategically important roles with communications companies for 25 years. Throughout, I’ve focused on my core competencies, building brand recognition and interfaces with key personnel.”

To which I mentally replied: “Huh?”

He went on…

“It’s been a personal paradigm of mine that quality control and dynamic leadership are essentials in today’s globalized business environment, and that’s what I feel I can bring to any company I work for.”

I had already made an initial assessment: “This guy is full of shit.”

But, knowing myself to be a person that often rushes to judgment,  I tried to keep the conversation going.

“So,” I said, “what, exactly, have you been doing all these years?”

“Bringing in a bottom line and achieving optimal results have always been goals that resonated with me.”

“That’s enough,” I thought. “I can’t take any more.”

I opened and shut my desk drawer loudly to feign some sort of activity in my office.

“I’m sorry to do this,” I said. “But I have to jump off the phone to handle an emergency. I enjoyed talking to you. I’ll be sure to look at your resume and get back to you if something comes up that meets your qualifications.”

And with that, I bid farewell to this young man. And he, whether he knew it or not, bid farewell to any chance he had of ever working for me.

In their book Why Business People Speak Like Idiots, authors Fugere, Hardaway, and Warshawsky say there are three reasons executives – and people applying for management positions – sometimes speak like this.

1. Their focus is on themselves, rather than on the person they’re speaking to. “When obscurity pollutes someone’s communications it’s often because the… goal is to impress and not to inform.”

2. They fear using concrete language, because saying exactly what they mean can make it hard to wiggle out of commitments. “Liability scares [some people], so they add endless phrases to qualify [their] views, acknowledging everything from prevailing weather conditions to the 12 reasons we can’t make a decision now.”

3. They want to elevate and even romanticize their thoughts and deeds, because they are afraid they aren’t impressive. They do so by using lofty language that disguises the mundane truth. They are afraid to appear ordinary. Their solution is to attempt to bamboozle everyone they speak with – and particularly those with power.

This is a very bad strategy. It’s basically the opposite of what a job seeker should do.

When applying for a job, only three things really matter to your prospective employer:

* What you know (your skill set)

* Who you are (your integrity)

* How you can help him (your work ethic)

Pretending to know things you don’t is a waste of your time, because you will be found out. Getting tossed onto the street after only a few weeks on the job is both embarrassing and an ugly blemish on your work history.

You can demonstrate your good character by being honest from the outset. Be candid about what you know and what you have done. But make it clear that you are confident you can quickly learn to do anything that is required of you.

Most importantly, you must understand this: In granting you an interview, your future employer is trying to find out if you can help him solve his problems and grow his business.

He isn’t looking to be impressed. He’s looking for someone who can make his life easier by doing a great job. Your job during the interview is to sell yourself as being that person.

And the first rule of successfully selling yourself is to make sure you’ve got the basics down pat:

* You must be good at something – quite good.

* That something must be useful to the success of the business you are attempting to work for.

If you’re a longtime reader of mine, you already know what I mean by that: It must be some financially valued skill. Generally speaking, that’s one of four things: marketing, selling, creating profitable products, or managing profits. (I’ve written about these skills many times – most recently, here.)

* You must prove that you are good.

And then you must deliver.

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Fine Art As a Long-Term Investment* 

“There’s something to be said about the art-industrial complex, the collectors who recognize that your work has some sort of future economic value.” – Kehinde Wiley

In 1989, a triptych by Francis Bacon sold for $7 million.

In 2013, a similar piece by Bacon sold for almost $140 million. Assuming the two pieces are roughly the same (a fair assumption), that amounts to a profit of more than $130 million in 24 years.

In terms of compound annual growth, it equates to a bit more than 13%. And that’s better than the stock market’s annualized return (just over 10% annually) for that same period.

In my first essay in this series, I made the broad case for why you should consider investing in art: If you invest wisely, you can do very well by earning a return on your money that is about as good as stocks but with a lot less volatility.

Today, I’m going to explain why so many ordinary, “amateur” art lovers – people who are not necessarily financially savvy – have, nevertheless, seen their art holdings appreciate amazingly, leaving them and their heirs immensely rich.

Let’s begin with this…

A Fundamental Difference 

There is an important difference between the psychology of the usual stock investor and that of the usual art collector.

The stock investor is motivated by a desire to build wealth. He buys stocks hoping they will grow in value and thereby contribute to his net worth. The art collector is motivated primarily by an emotional attachment to art and art collecting. She may hope to see her art collection appreciate in value, but her motivation in buying art is more complicated.

When I started buying Coca-Cola stock, for example, I didn’t buy it because I liked the taste of Coke. And I certainly didn’t ask for a stock certificate so I could hang it on my wall. I bought shares in Coca-Cola because I believed they would appreciate in value while paying me good dividends for as long as I held them. I bought them to help me grow my wealth.

When I bought my first watercolor by Diego Rivera, I was aware that I was buying the work of an important 20th Century modernist painter. But my motivation for buying it wasn’t its potential for appreciating. It was the desire I had to own it, to have it and keep it, and to display it and look at it.

I bought it because I had fallen in love with Rivera’s artistry and his place in art history. I wanted to show my friends – by hanging his work on my walls – that this master painter was, in some way, a part of my life.

The Sorry Psychology of the Individual Investor 

Although investors buy stocks for the clear and single purpose of increasing their wealth, they don’t do nearly as well as you might think.

According to countless studies, individual investors – even the “sensible” ones who buy serious companies like Coca-Cola – make far less on stocks and bonds than they should. This is also true of mutual fund investors and even of people who invest in index funds.

Index funds are mutual funds that track the market. So how can investors do worse than the market if they are investing in the market?

The reason, these studies show, is in their psychology.

Individual investors have a tendency to sell their stocks when  prices are dropping and buy into the market when prices are rising. This, everyone knows, is not the way to optimize a stock market portfolio. These investors violate good sense because of their emotions. But they are not attached to the stocks per se; they are attached to the fluctuations of their pricing.

In other words, they are no different than art collectors in their tendency to let emotional attachments rule them, but they attach their emotions to the wrong thing.

Art Collectors Are the Same but Different 

That explains why so many stock investors generally do so poorly. But why is it that some art lovers – even those who have, as I said, no financial acumen at all – often make gobs of money collecting art?

To answer that question, we must first understand something about the value history of fine art.

According to Kyle Sommer of JPMorgan Chase, “Art tends to move in slow and long-term cycles. Looking at performance on a risk-adjusted basis [returns divided by standard deviation] over the last 50 years, the Mei Moses World All Art Index matched that of the S&P 500 index. On a 25-year basis, the Mei Moses World All Art Index looked relatively strong, outpacing the MSCI EAFE as well as the S&P 500.” [The MSCI EAFE is an equity index that measures the performance of markets outside the US and Canada.]

So, one answer is that the ups and downs of art markets tend to be less dramatic than those of stocks. As a result, there is less opportunity for art collectors to overreact to price fluctuations, buying when they should be selling and selling when they should be buying.

But a more important answer is that art collectors are fundamentally less likely to make irrational buying/selling decisions when there happen to be fluctuations.

And that is because, as I said above, they form emotional attachments to the art itself. Their core desire is  to hold and keep the art object so they can enjoy it. Profiting from it is, at best, a secondary consideration.

If you know any art collectors, you have seen the truth of this in action. Art collectors love everything about collecting art. They love buying it at auctions, in galleries, and at exhibitions. They love putting it up on their walls and showing it to their friends. They love learning about it. And they love looking at it.

But if and when an opportunity to sell it comes up… that, they do not love.

I discovered this truth about yours truly when I opened my first art dealership – Morgan Fitzgerald Fine Art – nearly 30 years ago.

The first piece I put up for sale was a landscape by a mid-18th century French painter. I had bought it years earlier for $2,500. Its market value had doubled and I was offered $5,000 for it by a fellow collector. I should have been happy to complete my first sale at this price, but I was mortified. I told him my asking price was $7,500… and he quickly came back with a $7,500 offer. That convinced me that I should never sell the piece. It hangs on the wall of my library today.

No, art collectors don’t like selling their art. If the value of a particular piece goes up, they feel vindicated in their decision to buy it and their attachment to it becomes stronger. And if the price goes down, they feel upset not with the object or their decision to buy it but with the art market! (“These idiots don’t realize how great this painting is!”)

We collectors of art like the idea that the pieces we buy will appreciate because it makes us feel smart and it justifies our spending habits. But we don’t like selling our paintings and drawings and sculptures because we value the pride and pleasure they bring, and we don’t want to give that away.

That is our saving grace. And that is why so many amateur art collectors see the value of their collections rise so high. Our attachment to the thing rather than its price makes us natural  long-term investors. And long-term investing is always the smart, safe way to build real wealth.

* This series of essays gives you an advance look at a new book that I’m working on, based on my experiences over the past 40+ years as a collector and investor in fine art.  

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 The End of Real Knowledge 

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.” – Leo Tolstoy

“When I take over the world the first thing I’m going to do is abolish social media,” I announced.

“Yeah, right,” my sister said.

“Not funny!” my niece shouted.

“You can abolish Facebook, but don’t touch my Twitter,” my daughter-in-law warned.

We were joking. Sort of.

It’s depressing. I think of us as a family of book readers, and yet we seem to be spending less and less time reading books. Other than novels, we seem to be doing more and more of our reading online. And the trend in online reading is for shorter and shorter bytes.

I’m all about checking for facts on Wikipedia. I’m happy to read essays and editorials online. And, yes, I spend a minute now and then following friends and family members on social media.

But I don’t fool myself into believing that sort of “reading” is enough.

It is not enough for serious research. It is not enough for gathering news. It is not enough for learning anything worth learning. And it is certainly not enough for discovering any understanding that resembles truth.

“The medium  is the message,” Marshall McLuhan famously told us back in 1964.  And right now, the internet wants messages that are short and sweet.

I was walking with one of my trainers this afternoon, after a tough, 90-minute workout. I try to walk at least a half-hour a day in the sun to refill my Vitamin D tank. We were talking about our favorite political pundits. We listen to most of the same people and so we are equally familiar with their insights and viewpoints. Worse, we know the same facts and data points that these pundits point out.

“Why are you always agreeing with me?” I said.

He knew I was kidding.

But that’s a real concern. When you use search engines and social media to shape your thoughts on topical issues, you are doing the most cursory sort of research. A thesis of 600 to 1,200 words can be persuasively supported by a single fact. And almost any thesis, however absurd, can be cogently argued in essay form. The limited length of the essay format makes that possible.

Neither of those things is true for writing books. Books are long. Instead of jotting down 600 to 1,200 words, the writer must put down a hundred times that many. As someone who’s written several thousand essays and 28 books, I can attest to the fact that it is much more difficult to defend an idea for 350 pages than it is in a page and a half.

The reason for that is that the issues worth writing books about are almost always complex. Complex ideas require complex logical arguments plus facts – lots of facts – to make them persuasive. (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started writing a book based on an idea that worked beautifully in essay form, only to see it disintegrate as I got into it.)

If short essays are problematic in this way, so too are short communications of every kind. YouTube and other such digital media are replete with 4- to 6-minute video essays.

Twitter and its cousins feature opinions and statements that can be consumed in seconds, rather than minutes. The game here is to follow your favorite influencers’ briefest quips on some current topic, then read the comments from other followers and maybe post one of your own. This quickly degenerates into the digital equivalent of “playing the dozens,” a competition – engaged in mostly by black males on urban street corners – in which participants go head-to-head with their adversaries by slinging rhyming insults at one another.

At this point, the amount of real knowledge being conveyed is next to nothing.

For too many people these days, these hyper-short communications is the preferred way to get and offer ideas and opinions. And not just ideas and opinions, but also news.

It’s scary to think that people today feel that they get all the information they need to know about any current event through these media.

Not only are they content with such miniscule information, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the depth of knowledge they have and the strength of their views.

If all of this weren’t bad enough, this new fondness for superficial knowledge is aided and abetted by the algorithms these media employ. They have been formulated to make sure users have the enjoyment of seeing their preferences constantly reinforced. If you are on the political right, you will get right-wing news. If you are on the political left, you will get left-wing news.

Pick any hot topic (the coronavirus, the shutdown, the George Floyd killing, for example) and study the news you get compared to the news that someone with different views gets. You will be amazed.

The algorithms compound the true knowledge problem by shielding users from ideas (and even facts) that do not support their prejudices. Users are fed an endless stream of bits and pieces that make it virtually impossible for them to be aware of the complexity of any issue – and this is especially true for the most important issues of the day.

I am not the first essay writer to make this point. I considered writing on it before, but it never felt important to me. I must have had some kind of naïve faith in the intelligence of the individual.

But when I consider that topical conversations have become so void of good thinking, and how the new, briefer media is stimulating the deadly combination of weak ideas and strong feeling, it seems inevitable that we are moving quickly into an era where real knowledge is about as attractive to information consumers as a kale salad.

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The End of Intimacy, Trust, and Love 

“When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.” – Andy Warhol

I’ve been thinking about how the world has been coming apart lately.

Homo sapiens, as is often pointed out, are social creatures. We live in concentric social circles that extend outwards from the individual in degrees of love, trust, and intimacy.

At the center is the individual – i.e., YOU. Around you is a small circle of people you greatly love and deeply trust. This may include your spouse and immediate family and closest friends. But it may not. You know they are in your innermost circle because losing any one of them would be devastating to you. It would change your life forever. It would feel like losing a part of your heart.  This is your Circle of Love.

Beyond them is a larger circle of people with whom you have good and comfortable relationships. You like them and they like you. You know how to enjoy each other’s company, and when you are together, you shift immediately into that familiar social mode. You may even say (and believe) that you love them. But you know – if you are honest with yourself – that you would not be devastated if they disappeared from your life. Still, you believe that you can trust them to help you if you need help. That matters to you. This group, too, can include family or friends. This is your Circle of Trust.

The third circle that surrounds you is your Circle of Acquaintanceship. It is comprised of people you interact with regularly but don’t know – or care – very much about. These are people from whom you might ask a favor and for whom you might do a favor, but only if it is not a terribly big one. And then it would depend on your mood.

Beyond that, there is a fourth circle: the billions of people you don’t know and that you care about only in the most abstract way. This is the Circle of the Others.

Those four circles have comprised man’s social universe for millennia. However, in the middle of the twentieth century, as we began to get most of our daily information from radio and television, a new circle appeared. This fifth circle was comprised of all the people we had never met personally but about whom we had strong feelings and opinions.

This fifth circle quickly pushed the fourth to the perimeter and then moved into third position. We began to trust the pundits we admired on radio and TV more than we trusted our neighbors. And we began to love our favorite TV personalities more than we loved our neighbors, too, even though we knew nothing about them but the characters they played.

Welcome to the Circle of Delusion… otherwise known as the Circle of Social Entropy…otherwise known as How We Put an End to Civilization.

Since the proliferation of social media, the Circle of Social Entropy has been nudging its way inwards towards the center of our social universe. It bypassed the Circle of the Others almost immediately and then the Circle of Acquaintanceship soon thereafter. Today, for millions, it has bypassed the Circle of Trust and is threatening to bypass even the Circle of Love. (An easy way to measure this is by seeing what’s been happening on Facebook the last few years. People are deleting “friends” over social and political issues.) In real life, friendships and families are disintegrating over social media posts.

In his 1964 book Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan argued that, by its nature, media has an effect on the ideas and sentiments that people form. He was right about that.

What social media has done in a very short time is astonishing. It has essentially allowed virtual relationships to move closer in our universe of intimacy than real ones. Increasingly, we have greater trust in the pundits, politicians, celebrities, and influencers we encounter daily through social media than we do in our neighbors, extended family, and friends.

I believe we are at the end of the way we have, for more than 100,000 years, developed relationships with other people. We are quickly moving into a world where love, and trust, and intimacy will be a largely digital experience.

What’s happening today is the end of real relationships. To me, that means an end to freedom and individuality.

And it gets worse. We are also on the threshold of The End of Real Knowledge. I’ll talk about that on Wednesday.

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 “We can no longer ignore the fact that America is not the… land of the free and the home of the brave.” – Fannie Lou Hamer

Black Lives Matter 

George Floyd was arrested, handcuffed, put facedown to the ground, and then chocked to death because he was accused of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.

Thanks to the omnipresence of cellphone cameras, it was videotaped – all eight minutes of it – for the world to see.

It wasn’t the first time we’d seen videotape of an unarmed black man being shot and killed by the police. But there was something about the insouciant way in which he was killed – the officer, hands in his pockets, kneeling, with the full weight of his body, on Floyd’s neck, while onlookers screamed, while Floyd gasped for air and pleaded for his life – that made this killing almost unbearable to watch and set the country afire.

There is so much to say about this. I’m going to try to limit myself today to just a few points.

Black lives matter.

What does that mean? It doesn’t mean that other lives don’t matter. It means that we cannot have a legal system, a justice system, and a police system that treats the killing of blacks as less serious than the killing of other races.

That is indisputable. The argument is about whether and if so how often they do. And that is where the argument belongs.

Police brutality is a real thing.

It is not nearly as common as many think, but it’s real and it’s scary.

The cop that killed George Floyd had multiple complaints against him over the years. Not just one or two but more than a dozen. And some of them were for harassment and brutality. He should have been dismissed from the force. The fact that he wasn’t points to a problem with the system of managing police misconduct. This can be fairly called a systemic problem.

I don’t believe that most cops are brutal. But I believe that those that are brutal are protected by the passive compliance of many of their fellow policeman, just as we saw in this case: three cops keeping the frantic onlookers at bay while their colleague was slowly committing murder.

White privilege?

I believe that the popular idea of white privilege is pure bullshit. But I also believe that when it comes to interacting with the police, being a well-dressed white person is an advantage. Call it a privilege.

I can’t give you facts to support this. That would be impossible because you can’t tabulate what happens in a split second in a person’s mind. But I can tell you three quick stories.

Story #1

Dr. Marshal and I were driving along the highway in his black SUV. The windows were tinted. It was evening. We were in rural Maine. As the cop walked to the car, I noticed that I was afraid. Why was that? It was because John was black. And not just black, but ex division-one football-sized black. And then I had a calming thought: “The policeman is going to look at John and he will be alarmed. Then he will look at me and see a well-dressed white man sitting beside him. And he will relax.” That’s exactly what happened. I could see it in his eyes.

Story #2

I was sitting in a police station in Washington, DC, handcuffed to a chair. I had been arrested because I had interfered with what I thought was a rape. The woman in the car was screaming “Rape!” It turned out the man she was accusing was a cop. So I got arrested for interfering with his arrest.

As I was sitting there across from the booking desk, an officer walked in with a middle-aged black man in handcuffs. He was well dressed. I don’t remember what he was charged with. I do remember that the booking officer started insulting him, calling him “four eyes” because he was wearing glasses. The black man calmly told the cop he should not speak to him that way, that he was a citizen and a lawyer. The desk sergeant tried to parry with him verbally, but he was unable to match the arrested man’s wit. Then he walked around the table, took the man by his handcuffs, and dragged him down a corridor to the holding cells.

Maybe the cop thought no one could see down the corridor. But I could see from where I was seated. He beat the shit out of the guy and then walked back to his desk, grinning and dust-clapping his hands as if to say, “Well, I guess I showed him.”

His eyes fell on me. And I said – because I couldn’t stop myself from saying it – “You must be proud. You’re a real tough guy.”

He glared at me and I imagined the headline: Journalist Hangs Himself in Jail Cell. Then he lowered his eyes a bit… and walked past me.

Story #3

Six months later, I’m awakened by a woman screaming in the alley next to our townhouse. I jump out of bed, head down the three flights of stairs in my underwear, grab two steak knives from the kitchen, and run into the alley. Sure enough, the woman had been fending off an attacker.

I was fast but my neighbor, a doctor (and black, as was the woman), was already attending to her.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

He looked at me, alarmed.

“Mark,” he said, “I don’t think you want to be here when the police arrive. I just called them. Told them what happened. She was attacked by a man with a knife.”

I realized what he meant. I turned and started walking back up the alley towards my home, but it was too late. The police car was there, headlights pointed directly at me, in my underwear, a steak knife in either hand. I stood there, imagining the headline: Businessman Killed by Police After Being Mistaken for a Rapist. But they didn’t shoot. They didn’t even draw their weapons. They walked toward the scene of the crime.

“Good evening, officers,” I said as they passed me.

“Good evening,” they replied.

So those are three of my stories. I have more than that. But I think these three fairly illustrate my opinion that if I were black and not white I might not be here now to tell them.

The Number You Will Never See

If you do an internet search for facts on homicides and race, you will find very little that is helpful. The first three pages will contain pieces that correctly cite data that shows that blacks are arrested, jailed, and killed by cops at 2.5 the rate of whites.  These data are always explained in percentage-of-population terms. What they don’t give you is information about how many blacks and whites are jailed and killed by police compared to the number of blacks and whites resist arrest for the crimes they are charged with. If they did you would realize that there is no difference between the two. What that means is that it is very dangerous to resist arrests, regardless of your color.  (This does not mean that being white isn’t an advantage when being stopped, interrogated, or arrested. I hope my stories clarify my view on that. This is a warning that any parent that, like me, has had run ins with the police, makes to his teenage children.)

Nor do they parse the numbers by age and sex. If they did, you would be able to discern that more than 80% of the violent crimes committed by blacks are committed by young men between the ages of 16 and 28. That should not surprise you, because the percentage of violent crimes committed by whites between the ages of 16 and 28 is also about 80%. Likewise with Latinos. Likewise with Asians.

Another set of data that you never hear about has to do with the economics of murder. Again, about 80% of the murders in the US are committed by men from working-class or welfare families. And that statistic, too, is the same, regardless of race.

Solutions? 

So what does all this add up to? What can we do to put an end to this tragic killing?

If you have an opinion already, this probably won’t change your mind, but my view is that you have to treat each of the symptoms differently.

The use of “unnecessary force” by police can only be changed by managing the way police are hired and trained.

In terms of hiring, I would be interested to find out what the effect would be of requiring that policemen have, at least, two years of college.

In terms of training, policemen should be given better, more realistic instruction as to how to go about their jobs without jeopardizing their own lives and the lives of the people they stop and arrest. Some jurisdictions have prohibitions against high-speed chases for non-violent offenses, for example. That makes sense to me.

As to the question of homicides generally and black homicides in particular, one major step forward would be for the media to start paying more attention to the non-police homicides. In 2019 more than seven thousand African Americans were murdered. Over ninety percent of them were killed by their fellow African Americans. More than 80% of the killers and those murdered were between 16 and 38. And nearly 100% of the killers were men.

Why isn’t the media reporting on this? If they actually cared believed that black lives matter you would think they’d be not just reporting these terrible tragedies, but editorializing about them too. They would be telling us, all of us, the facts we need to know: that homicide in America — black or white — is an epidemic that has been raging in America for decades. That more than half of it is drug related. And that it is committed by a tiny fraction — less than one tenth of one percent of the population — and almost all of them, black and white, young men (in their twenties and thirties) with prior arrests. Why aren’t we hearing about this? Why have we heard little to nothing about the black men and women that have been shot and killed last week in the rioting? Why is it that the media seems so alarmed by police shootings of black men when the fact is that they are 782% more likely to be killed by civilians than cops? Could it be that reporting on those other 7,000+ deaths won’t sell more advertising? Could it be that, from the media’s point of view, all those deaths don’t matter?

And as to the economic question, that will only be corrected when we have fewer young men living on minimum wages and the welfare system. But that’s not going to happen any time soon, if it ever happens. The American economy is in deep debt. We are the most indebted country in not just the world but in the history of the world. The Covid Crash merely exposed it. On an inflation-adjusted basis, wages for most working Americans have been frozen for more than twenty years, while prices have been edging up.

The outlook workers that don’t have advanced degrees is beyond dismal. Between the advance of robotics and AI, our economy is quickly shifting away from one that relies on human labor. I discuss this issue in Chapter One of Principles of Wealth Building (not yet published). The sort version is this: It’s delusional to think that economic prospects for young men without college degrees will be improved by any more government programs or handouts. The trillions we’ve spent on the War on Poverty have resulted in the decimation of the communities that are dependent on welfare. It’s even crazier to think that the promises that liberal and leftist politicians are making will solve the problem.

If a young black man asked for my advice on what to do about this I’d say what I told myself when I was young and poor and my prospects were miserable: Forget about other people helping you. The best talkers are the most full of shit. You are not responsible for your situation, but you have to take responsibility for your economic future because, believe me, nobody else — no matter what kind of bullshit they may sling at you — will.

I believe we will see improvement in the first category. I don’t believe we will see any improvement in the second and third categories. And to explain that I would reference Malcolm X, who believed that depending on white people to solve black problems is a dangerous delusion.

If you judge by actions and not by words, it’s hard to deny the allegation that the white-dominated press and most of the white-dominated political class care about black lives only when it helps them sell newspapers and win elections.

This is how it has always been. And this is how it will continue to be until black Americans seize the power they have as a population 42 million to solve the problems that white people talk about only if and when it matters to them.

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“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” – John C. Maxwell

Hiring Someone to Grow Your Business:

The 7 Personality Traits of a Superstar Entrepreneurial CEO 

So, you want to hire someone to run your business?

Maybe you’re nearing retirement. Or maybe the person running it now is doing a disappointing job.

In my career, I’ve been in this position maybe a hundred times. In fact, I’m waist-deep in it again right now – with three companies simultaneously, with annual revenues ranging from $15 million to $100 million.

It’s not easy.

So much is at stake.

So how do you find the right person? What qualities should you look for in this all-important search?

This is what you will hear from an executive placement expert: “You need someone with experience… someone with good communication skills… someone that can build strong teams. But most important, you need a big thinker – a visionary and a risk taker.”

When I was young, I was vulnerable to that sort of business-school bullshit. It may be appropriate for a billion-dollar business. But if you have a $10 million or $100 million business, “qualifications” like that won’t help you at all.

Running an entrepreneurial business is very different from running a mature one. A mature business needs to be managed. An entrepreneurial business needs to be grown.

In past essays, I’ve explained my theory of “growers” and “tenders.” Tenders have a talent for solving problems and making a business run smoothly. Growers have a talent for growing revenues and profits.

To run your entrepreneurial business, you need a grower – a superstar with the following qualities:

1. He’s competitive:He doesn’t hate losing… but he loves winning.
2. She’s Pareto-focused: She understands her priorities and follows the 80/20 principle in pursuing her objectives.
3. He’s a work horse: If he has to, he will outwork anyone else in the company. It doesn’t matter if it takes 18 hours a day.
4. She’s knowledgeable: She understands the business inside and out – an understanding that comes from an interest in figuring out how things work. She wants to know what is going on and why.
5. He’s fearless: He’s not afraid to hurt feelings. He’s not afraid to fire people or to tell them when he thinks they have erred.
6. She’s open-minded: She’s open to new ideas, but doesn’t accept ideas that don’t make sense to her.
7. He’s strategically lazy: He always wants to be the smartest person in the room (and the most powerful) but he’s wise enough to understand that if he puts himself in charge of everything he will never achieve anything beyond what he, as one person, can do. Plus, he doesn’t want to work that hard. So he hires the most talented people he can find and gives them the freedom to do what they do best.

So why am I not telling you that you need a “visionary” and a “risk taker”?

 When it comes growing an entrepreneurial business, I can’t think of any quality that matters less than vision.

When you are growing a start-up company, you have no idea how things will develop and what challenges you will face. That’s because markets are dynamic and problems are specific. You can’t vision your company into success. You have to react and respond, test and retest, try and fail until the future of the business makes itself clear.

The best entrepreneurial leaders (i.e., growers) don’t concern themselves with what the business will become in 7 to 10 years. They focus on this year and this month and this week. Long-term for a grower is, at best, two to three years.

As for risk takers…

 That entrepreneurs (and the CEOs that run entrepreneurial companies) must be risk takers may be a bromide that is even more common than visionary. I think it is equally untrue.

I would not hire anyone to run any aspect of my business (except perhaps a sales team) that I would judge as a risk taker. There is so much inherent risk in building any business. The challenge is to make progress without losing all your time, money, and patience – and that requires the ability to make smart, low-risk, high-growth decisions.

So if you are shopping for a CEO, look for the abovementioned 7 traits… and steer clear of risk takers and visionaries.

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“He that is of the opinion that money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money.” – Benjamin Franklin

How to Be Happy With Your Money 

It is often said that money doesn’t buy happiness.

When I had no money, which was the case for the first 30 years of my life, I resented that notion. It seemed a glib sentiment expressed condescendingly by those that had to those that had not.

It was also an idea that I didn’t want to hear. I was on the threshold of a 20-year crusade to make money – as much money as I possibly could. If my ambitions had been to be an actor and some Hollywood celebrity said acting wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, I’d have felt the same way. (“You’ve done it. And you have it. I haven’t done it and I don’t have it. Yet. So don’t get in my way!”)

That was then. Now, so many years later, I have more money than I ever imagined I’d have. And guess what? I’ve come to the conclusion that the “money doesn’t buy happiness” cliché, like most clichés, is true.

Don’t take my word for it. There have been countless studies to support this thesis. And virtually all of them conclude the same thing: Once you have enough money to pay the bills, go to a restaurant now and then, and take a vacation once or twice a year, having more money doesn’t make you happier.

But I didn’t know this when I was wearing hand-me-downs in high school. And I didn’t know it when I started my career.

From 1982 to about 1998, I spent 60 to 80 hours a week working my ass off to make and save money. I approached those objectives with monomaniacal intensity. And largely because of that (I had no natural genius for business), I was successful, moving my net worth from zero to nearly mid-eight figures in 16 years.

During those years, I had countless pleasurable moments. But I can’t say I led a generally happy life. I was frequently excited, inspired, and impassioned. But I was also frequently on the verge of depression and despair.

Whenever news of some famous guy offing himself grabbed the media’s attention and people were asking “why,” I said nothing. But I got it.

In the winter of 2000, I started writing about wealth building in Early to Rise, an ezine I published for 10 years. One of the subjects I researched and wrote about on and off throughout that decade, was the relationship between money and happiness. And it was almost always about the wisdom of the money-doesn’t-buy happiness cliché.

But that didn’t stop me from continuing to make “getting richer” my number one goal in life.

Finally, the Realization 

Then one day when I was vacationing with K in Rome, I had a life-changing moment. We were crossing a bridge over the Tiber River, and I was lost in thought, worrying, as usual, about some business deal, when K stopped. She said something, but I could not hear her. This was not the first time that happened. It had happened a thousand times before.

I asked her what she had said.

“I was thinking about how much I’m enjoying this trip,” she said. “And I asked if you were having fun.”

“Right,” I said. “Fun.”

And then I thought, “Wait! What am I doing? Enough of this! I’m not going to spend any more time oblivious to the world around me, thinking only about how I can get richer than I already am.”

And I meant it. When we got back to our hotel room, I opened my laptop, went to my yearly list of long-term priorities, and moved “financial goals” from the top to the bottom of the list.

It wasn’t a miracle cure, but it was a start. For the first time, I was able to let happiness seep into my life, a drop at a time.

An Unexpected Extra 

Oddly, though, despite the fact that I was no longer fretting about adding to my wealth, my net worth continued to increase. In the 19 years that followed that walk over the Tiber, it doubled and then doubled again.

What happened was this:

I continued working because I liked the work I was doing. I continued to make plans and negotiate deals and create products and develop marketing strategies. But I did it with a different mindset. I set objectives and pursued them, but without caring about whether I accomplished them or not.

My 30-year-old self would have considered that last statement to be another case of condescending bullshit, but it didn’t feel like bullshit. It felt real.

What I finally figured out was another cliché, a biblical adage (Timothy 6:10) that is often misstated. The misstatement is: Money is the root of all evil. The actual statement is: For the love of money is the root of all evil.

I interpret that this way: If you can work towards building your wealth without attaching yourself emotionally to the goal, you can have your cake (gaining net worth) and eat it too. (Don’t worry! Be happy!)

In other words, if you accept the fact that money won’t bring you happiness and that desiring it will bring you (and those around you) myriad forms of pain, you can rid yourself of the ambition of forever acquiring more.

Let’s say you want to retire. You hate the work you’re doing and you want to quit as soon as you possibly can.

So you do this: You figure out the lowest possible amount of money that you need in your retirement account to live comfortably ever after. And you promise yourself that when you reach that “magic number,” you will quit your job.

By accepting the fact that more money won’t bring you more happiness, you won’t be tempted to ratchet that number up when you reach it. (As I did about a half-dozen times.)

Then you get back to work. And you work with a purpose. But your purpose will no longer be to earn more and more money. Your purpose will be to do a really good job until you reach your magic number.

I know this may sound like nonsense. If you think so, I believe it’s because you haven’t tried it. If and when you do, I believe you will find – as I did – that you will work better than you ever did. And as a bonus, you will enjoy your work much, much more.

Sometimes, Money Really Can Buy Happiness 

There is another thing you should consider doing: Rethink the way you are spending the money you earn. When our hearts are attached to dreams of making lots of money, we tend to spend what we have in foolish ways.

You may have heard the argument that people generally get more long-term pleasure out of spending money on experiences rather than things.

The first time I heard it, I was repelled by it. It seemed illogical. Experiences are ephemeral, I had always believed. You have them and they are gone. Poof! But things – ah, things last!

It didn’t take me too long to realize the fallacy of this logic. Experiences can last. They can last a lifetime. And the pleasure they bring can be deep. Things usually bring a lot of immediate pleasure, which ebbs over time. Eventually, your things might give you no pleasure at all.

So I resolved to spend less on things and more on experiences. And that has worked wonderfully well.

For example, I long ago discovered that I was getting very little extra pleasure from the collectible  cars I owned. The excitement I had driving them the first year or two had disappeared. Today, I want my cars to be comfortable and low maintenance. I still have a 1989 NSX, which I rarely drive. But the rest of my collectible cars are long and happily gone.

On the other hand, the art I own gives me pleasure all the time. It is not the art itself, the thingness of the art, that I enjoy, but my experience of enjoying it every day. So I continue to buy and sell art, always in an effort to improve the quality of my collection, because the experience of doing so gives me lasting pleasure.

I’ve also discovered – and this should not surprise you – that I can “buy” a considerable dose of happiness by spending my money on other people. Instead of buying a new car for myself, for example, I’ll buy one for my sister or lease a car for a friend that needs one.

In fact, when I think of the money K and I have spent over the years, there is no doubt that the greatest yield came from the financial help we’ve given to family and friends in need and to our Community Center in Nicaragua.

Still doubtful? That’s okay. I spent many years where you are – and I’m glad I lived beyond them. I wish the best for you.

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Sebastian was flattered when Michael, his former protégé, asked him to critique the promotion he’d written. After all, Sebastian hadn’t written much copy in the 10 years that had passed since they worked together. And during that time, Michael had written a score of blockbusters. He was the man.

Nevertheless, Sebastian agreed to do it.

“It’s generally very good,” he wrote in his critique. “But I have one idea that you might want to consider…”

After sending it off, Sebastian worried. His suggestion would require Michael to spend hours reworking the lead. And he wasn’t sure that his idea was any better than what Michael had already written. He feared that Michael would be insulted.

Sebastian didn’t have to worry for very long. An hour later, Michael returned his email. “That was brilliant!” he wrote. “I don’t know how you do it! I’m going to get to it right away!”

Sebastian felt immense relief. Michael was in an entirely different mindset. He was focused on the work, on making it better. For him, it had nothing to do with feelings.

How to Get Better at What You Do Best 

“If you accept your limitations you go beyond them.” – Brendan Behan

The greatest challenges we face in life are obstacles that reside inside of us. When it comes to mastering a skill, the greatest challenge is not the work and time involved in acquiring it but the desire to be a master before you become one.

Hubris – Aristotle’s term for excessive, blinding pride – is the fatal flaw that foiled many tragic heroes in literature, from Oedipus to King Lear to Captain Ahab. And in developing any complex skill, such as copywriting, hubris manifests itself in the same way. The copywriter believes – or desperately wants to believe (which is sometimes worse) – that his/her writing is above reproach.

This is equally true for musicians, tennis players, salsa dancers, sumo wrestlers, and skateboarders. Those who are willing to say “I can do better” do better. Those who say “I am the greatest” soon take a tumble.

What you want in your career is the confidence that follows accomplishment, not the pride that precedes a fall.

So that’s the first lesson: No matter how good you are at what you do, never tell yourself that you can’t get better and never believe you can’t learn from others, even those that cannot perform at the level you have attained.

Think about your strongest skill – the talent or capability that is most important to the achievement of your main goal. Now ask: “Am I willing to acknowledge that there are people in my universe who are better at this than I am?”

If you can accept the limitations of your strongest skill, there is no limit to how far you can develop it.

The Fire and the Funnel 

Ego is the fire that fuels our ambitions. The ambition to master any skill is sparked by the heart’s imagination – seeing oneself at the top of the podium, lauded for one’s achievement, acknowledged for one’s value.

But when ambition becomes pride and pride becomes excessive, the skill seeker stops learning. He cannot learn because he believes he has nothing to learn. He refuses criticism. He defends his weakest efforts. He denies his failure – to others and to himself.

On fire with an exaggerated opinion of himself, he burns out.

Humility is the funnel that can prevent this. Humility set boundaries on pride and keeps the ego fire under control.

When I started actively training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) at age 47, I wasn’t very good at it at all. I had always prided myself on being a good grappler and a scrappy fighter, but I found out very quickly that those old confidences could not sustain me. I got my ass handed to me by guys that were half my size.

I had a choice: Be humble or be proud.

Pride would have spurred me to announce that BJJ was a bullshit sport and quit, thus avoiding future humiliations on the mat. Humility would have let me accept the reality of my incompetence, thus allowing me to continue to practice and learn.

Happily, I chose to be humble. And since then, every time I’ve advanced through the belt rankings, from white to blue to purple to brown and to black, I’ve had to face the fact that there were many others – not just higher belts but lower belts, too – that were more skillful than I.  Even today, getting beaten by a purple belt or a brown belt challenges my pride. And each time, I have to choose to accept the fact that others are better… because if I don’t, I cannot continue to improve.

Human beings are designed to get better through practice. Everything we ever learn to do – from walking to talking to writing concertos – gets better through practice. Practice makes our fingers move faster, our hearts beat stronger, our brains think smarter. What is it that Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods talk about when they talk about their careers? It’s not that they were gifted with extraordinary natural talent. It’s that they worked harder than their competitors.

Practice doesn’t make perfect. That’s a foolish idea. Practice makes better. And better is where all the enjoyment is in learning.

To become a better version of whatever you are good at now, you need the fuel of your ambition to drive you forward. But without the funnel of humility to restrain your pride, you will stop practicing. And when you stop practicing, you are out of the game.

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We are in a taxi in Paris – the four of us. PB gets a call. She gives us the sorry look and looks at the phone. She smiles.

“It’s L,” she says.

L is her daughter, her bright, beautiful daughter. We’ve known L since she was born.

“What’s up?” PB says to L.

For a full minute, she listens intently, the smile gone from her face. We wait anxiously, wondering how bad the news is.

”Okay,” PB says. “Now calm down. Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to go to the nearest Four Seasons. Speak to the concierge. He’ll be able to help you.”

Pause.

“Love you too!”

PB and her daughter are very close. And that’s a wonderful thing. Here’s the problem. L is a full-grown woman – a married, professional woman.

What We (Should) Want for Our Children 

“Of all nature’s gifts to the human race, what is sweeter to a man than his children?” – Marcus Tulius Cicero

When my children were infants, I wanted only one thing for them: good health. 

I’m sure every parent feels this way. The wish for a child’s health is deep and strong. It’s as deep as DNA and as strong as the survival instinct. It is, in fact, a manifestation of the survival instinct. In wanting our infant children to be healthy, we are, at bottom, wanting the deepest part of our selves – our DNA – to survive.

When my children were young, I would have stepped in front of a train to save them. I still would.

I’ll bet you would, too.

Putting our children’s survival above our own is a good thing. But it’s not a virtuous thing. It’s an animal instinct motivated by biology.  So there you go.

Actually, I lied. There was another thing I wanted for my children when they were infants. I wanted them to be good looking. 

I know how that sounds. And I’m quite sure most parents would deny they wanted their kids to be good looking. But I did.

And why not?

If I had any other wishes for my infant children, I can’t remember them. So let’s move on.

When they were toddlers and continuing through their early childhoods, I wanted my kids to be good at just about everything they did. 

I wanted them to be quick learners, agile athletes, and accomplished at any extracurricular activity they joined.

Wanting these things for them felt as natural to me as my earlier wishes for their health and good looks. But it wasn’t nearly as strong. I definitely wanted them to quickly learn and shine in all of their growing challenges, but I wouldn’t step in front of that train to satisfy that want.

I’ve noticed that some parents seem to spend most of their time ferrying their kids to activities, cheering them on, and hiring tutors and coaches to develop their skills. Other parents never show up. Some of them probably have no time. Some just don’t care that much. The intensity of my desire for my kids to be good at everything fell somewhere in the middle. I signed them up for activities and showed up now and then. But I never coached them. Or paid someone to do it.

I remember going to one of my eldest son’s soccer games when he was only four. At the time, he had only a passing interest in the sport. I mean that literally. He spent most of his time standing in the grass looking down at the flowers. Every once in a while, the ball would land in his vicinity, at which point he would casually kick it away, as often as not to a team mate. “Good pass!” someone would shout. It usually turned out to be the parent of the child to whom my son had unwittingly passed the ball.

I never considered myself a fanatical parent. (Although my kids tell me that when it came to writing, I was like “Bull” Meecham, the character in Pat Conroy’s book The Great Santini that bounced a basketball off his son’s head.) But I do believe that the desire to see one’s young child excel  springs from the same DNA that makes us want them to be healthy and good looking. In other words, it is a desire that is natural and good, so long as it is reasonably restrained.

I also wanted my young children to be well mannered. 

When they were very young, my kids’ bad behavior often amused me. Their temper tantrums seemed oddly cute. (I have never felt that way about other people’s children.) And truth be told, I feel the same way about my grandchildren’s bad behavior today.

But by the time my kids were four or five, I was rarely entertained by their bad behavior.

K felt the same way. She believed that one of our parental duties was to help our children function successfully and appropriately in the world they were born into, which was our world, the adult world. We wanted them to be happy, but not at the expense of making people around them – children or adults – miserable.

For many parents, disciplining toddlers and young children is a harrowing experience. It wasn’t that way for us. Teaching our kids good manners was relatively easy, thanks to K, who understood the importance of setting clear boundaries.

K was a genius at this partly because she believed in self-discipline and partly because she herself was self-disciplined. No excuse for breaking a rule, no matter how ingenious, was accepted. Penalties – mostly time-outs – were enforced with unwavering consistency. (I was virtually no help in this regard.) K ruled the roost, and our boys were generally obedient and cooperative without losing their boyishness and their native instincts to cause a fair degree of chaos wherever they went.

When the boys grew larger and realized their mother could not physically enforce the punishments she gave them, they became emboldened and would occasionally defy her. This is when I became useful and when they began hearing the universal maternal refrain: “Wait till your father gets home!”

K did not believe in spanking, so I didn’t spank them. But I did employ the power of my deeper and louder voice to get their attention. And if they refused to go to their bedrooms for a time-out, I would escort them there. That was largely successful.

As they moved into their mid-teens, I wanted my children to be emotionally resilient and mentally strong. That wasn’t a decision I made formally. It happened serendipitously. 

Once, when my eldest son was about 15, we got into a play-wrestling match. It began as fun but quickly turned into the test that most fathers have with their teenage sons – the chance for the son to show his father that he is equal to him in strength and courage.

I felt my son’s strength the moment we began grappling. I didn’t initiate the higher level of play. He did. Had I not been wrestling competitively for years, he would have whooped me.  But since I did have the skills, I “upped my game.” I was on the verge of winning the battle when I had a flash thought: “If you do this, you are sending him a bad signal.”

So I let him win – and it saved us both. I feel sure that by winning that match, I would have damaged his self-confidence deeply and permanently. And that would have damaged my sense of being a good father even more.

The experience, short as it was, helped me realize that what I wanted most of all for him at that point of his life was that he would mature into a person that was mentally and emotionally stronger than me.

That’s what every healthy minded parent wants. Don’t you agree?

When my kids were in their early 20s, I wanted them to become financially independent.

I’m not sure how I arrived at this one. It may have been in response to talking to the boys about college. It may have been because I realized that they would soon be living away from us and would have to fend for themselves.

By that time, our financial situation had moved well beyond the meager straits we were in when the kids were small. We had the resources to support them financially for the rest of their lives, but we knew that would be a terrible thing to do. They had become hardworking, responsible, and self-sufficient human beings. We didn’t want to ruin that by laying a path ahead of them paved with easy access to money.

So we didn’t. We told them repeatedly that they would inherit nothing from us – that if they wanted the luxuries that money can provide, they would have to earn it themselves. They wore clothes bought at discount clothing stores. They were not permitted to have their own TVs or cellphones. They did not get an allowance, but they could work for spending money. And when they were 16, we didn’t buy them a car, like some of their friends’ parents did.

We deprived them of all these things because we wanted them to learn how to earn on their own and, even more important, understand that they were not entitled to our or anyone else’s wealth.

And it worked. During their college years and in all the years since, none of them has ever asked us for a nickel. I am immensely proud of that.

Of course, when they became adults and had their own children, we wanted to help them out in every way we could. But they were adamant about wanting to be financially independent. And though we keep trying to help out with this and that, I’m secretly pleased that they don’t want – or need – our help.

Now that our children are in their 30s and even approaching their 40s, I have discovered yet another wish I have for them. I want them to be and remain independent thinkers.

There is so much groupthink in the world today. When my kids were in college, they were exposed to all the politically correct ideas and ideologies that are still popular among academics. Sometimes I worried that they would emerge with heads full of conventional thinking. What was the point of going to a university for that?

One of my sons, fresh out of college, told me that he thought the Antifas were correct in sucker-punching people whose opinions they disagreed with. This irked the hell out of me. We debated the issue. But I couldn’t convince him of the absurdity of his position. It wasn’t his position that bothered me. It was the fact that he was making an argument that he had been taught by some jackass professor.

These days, I no longer worry about that. None of my sons sees eye-to-eye with me on anything. They have their own views and, like their father, they like to argue about them.

But the thinking behind their arguments is braver and more nuanced than it was when they were younger. Each in his way is skeptical of trendy ideas and opinions, analytical, and willing to state his mind. That makes me feel like, “Yes, son. You are a man now. You  can march forward into the miasma of bad thinking that awaits you and survive!”

And although they all express themselves differently in terms of style and temperament, they all make their arguments with less irritation and more kindness than I did at their age. That makes me proud.

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