What I Believe: About Affirmative Action

I feel about affirmative action the same way that I feel about charity. I am personally inclined to practice it, but I’m suspicious when it becomes corporate or governmental policy. As an institutional protocol, it can (and often does) do more harm than good.

When it puts people into positions they are qualified for, it can correct social imbalances, if such imbalances are the result of discrimination. But when it puts people into positions they are not qualified for, all sorts of problems arise. For the institution. For the other members of the institution. For the people the institution serves. And for the recipient of the affirmative action.

To make affirmative action work for underqualified people, there must be a commitment to provide them with the extra help they need to succeed. In my experience, that means investing in many, many hours of extra training and personal coaching. And even then, the odds are not good.

A “New” Cold War?

When I was born in 1950, the US and the Soviet Union had already begun its first proxy contest: the Korean War. In grammar school, our teachers regularly herded us into the school basement, a futile attempt to safeguard us from the eventuality of a nuclear attack. In high school, the Vietnam War was raging and boys my age were being drafted to fight. In the mid 1970s, while serving a two-year stint with the Peace Corps in Chad, I was exposed to the Cold War proxy fight there between the Soviet-backed north and the US-backed south. The official end of the Cold War took place in 1991, when the Soviet Union was broken into pieces. But now that Russia is trying to put some of those pieces back together, I have to wonder whether it ever ended at all.

What I Believe: About the Cold War

The “Cold War” is a term that describes several attenuated competitions between the USSR and the US. One competition was strategic and military: an effort on the part of the US to “contain” the spread of communism through proxy wars with the USSR. (See “Good to Know,” above.) The other was an ideological competition between two very different approaches to government’s role in economics. The US championed a decentralized, free market, capitalist economy. The USSR favored a centralized, controlled, socialist economy.

I believe the military/strategic contest was won by nobody. It was, in its entirely, almost as costly in economic and human terms as WWII.

As for the ideological contest, there’s no doubt that the USSR lost. But I don’t believe they were “defeated” by the US. I believe they failed on their own, because their approach was (and still is) unsustainable.

As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted be a writer. But I was always aware – perhaps because my father gave up his career as a writer for the steady income of teaching – that it was not going to be easy.

I took several courses in writing in college and graduate school, but my degrees were in English Literature, in case the writing dream didn’t pan out. I wrote a bit the next year while I made a living as a bartender, and I wrote a bit more from 1975 to 1977 as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa. I earned a meager living by teaching English at the University of Chad, but I wasn’t making a nickel from my writing.

I landed my first job as a professional writer for a business monthly called African Business & Trade. Why Leo Welt, the owner of the publishing company, hired me, I’ll never understand. I knew a few things about Africa. But I knew virtually nothing about business. I didn’t even understand the meaning of the word “trade.” (I’m not kidding!)

Despite what I imagined as lucid prose, my writing wasn’t wowing the subscribers to African Business & Trade. In fact, most of the responses we were getting from readers were criticisms of my ignorance and complaints about the naivety of my ideas. No kudos for my diction and style.

With Number One Son in the oven, I didn’t have the luxury to ignore these Philistines and go on honing my “craft.” I needed those weekly paychecks to pay the bills. So, I swallowed my pride and began to learn about… African business and trade!

I was accidentally drawn into an area of knowledge I never intended to study. And as I studied and learned, I discovered that writing about business and trade was a lot more interesting than I had imagined. I bent into it, and eventually became the writer I was being paid to be. Reader feedback turned positive. Renewal income went up. By the end of my second year, I had been promoted to Editor in Chief of all the company’s publications. I wrote essays on doing business in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. I even wrote my first published book: Information Beijing.

That landed me a job with a much larger publishing company in Florida, with greater prospects for me and my family and continued opportunities for developing my knowledge of writing. Including writing advertising copy.

I became a junior partner a year later, and ran the business as it grew from revenues of barely $1 million to $135 million in seven years. I attempted retirement when I was 39 and returned to work as a consultant and partner in another publishing company. Their revenues grew from $8 million to $100 million in about 7 years, and then to $500 million, and eventually broke the billion-dollar ceiling.

I played many roles in my career. One I always enjoyed was teaching what I had learned about the art and science of direct response copywriting. I give interviews about it now and then on podcasts for entrepreneurs, marketers, and copywriters. Click here to watch one I did recently.

What I Believe: About Group Decision-Making

Making good decisions is very difficult. And making good group decisions is even more difficult. That’s because it requires thinking. It requires moving the mind against the grain of conventionality. It mandates rigorous and constant self-criticism. And the questioning of every thought that feels right and comfortable.

I believe that most people spend very little time thinking. Really thinking. Instead, they busy their brains with unexamined facts and the undigested opinions of others.

Quick test: If your thoughts adhere consistently to any doctrine, ideology, or philosophy, you are not thinking.

Huh?

I receive a regular stream of mail and email from readers. Too many to answer individually, but not too many to read. About 10% of them are funny. Ha-ha funny. Another 10% are funny. Peculiar funny. Like this one from BK, in response to Wednesday’s post about “spoiled brats”…

“Jordan Peterson is a jackass. I give my child everything – everything she wants – because I want her to have what I never did.”

As Professor Peterson would say, “Well, BK, good luck with that!”

 And this one from GG…

“Hey Mark… There’s a small misspelling at the end of your Feb. 14 piece on Understanding the Buyer Brain. You wrote: ‘Do you see what I’m saying here? This feels like an important insight to me. I’m not sure, though, if I’ve explained it well. Let me know if you GROK this.’”

 I wasn’t 100% sure of the spelling of “grok” when I typed it in, so I checked it out online to make sure I got it right. I guess GG didn’t.

And this one from SD (versions of which I get about once a week, particularly on social media)…

“I’ve been a big fan for a long time. I’m starting a business. I was thinking maybe you’d like to mentor me.”

When I first began receiving such invitations, I was so flattered I wrote longish replies, explaining that I had like three full-time jobs and so sorry… After I tired of that, I’d reply by saying maybe, but my fee for mentoring was a million dollars down plus 50% of the business. When someone actually accepted those terms, I gave up being snarky. Now I reply with a single smiley face and go dark afterwards.

How Not to Raise Spoiled Brats 

I believe children grow up to be what their parents want them to be.

When my children were young, I wanted them to be good at everything they did – school, sports, music lessons, etc. And they did a reasonable job of that. But when they became young adults, I wanted something very different for them. I wanted them to be independent (financially and emotionally) and kind.

I believe that, as parents, our first two obligations are to make our children respectful of adults and children their own age. By building on these good habits, we can then focus on helping them become both independent and also kind. Independent so they can succeed in life when we are not there for them. And kind because we want them to grow into adults we can both like and admire.

I believe, further, that we cannot help our children become independent and kind by indulging them in whatever they want. Nor can we help them by befriending them. A good parent is a parent, which means setting reasonable expectations and firm boundaries.

Jordan Peterson has much to say on this topic. Click here for one of his thoughts on the challenges of raising children – in this case, on the consequences of overprotecting them.

My Revolutionary Indulgence Diet

At my age, I shouldn’t worry about how I look. It’s futile and undignified. And yet, I do.

When I’m feeling fat, I tell myself that my weight doesn’t matter. So long as I am fit and healthy, I should be happy. But I don’t like feeling fat. I know that from how I clothe myself at the beach. Above 220, I wear a shirt. Always. From 210 to 220, I will reluctantly take it off and suck in my belly. Below 210, I want to disrobe.

After 20 years of trying and failing at the weight-loss game, I gave up.

But then, several weeks ago, I woke up with an idea.

I had been telling myself that I was too busy to diet. Too stressed to take on more stress. That had been my excuse for indulging in three bad habits that were almost certainly contributing to my struggle with weight: drinking alcohol, eating starch, and smoking cigars.

I didn’t feel the need to eliminate any of them entirely or permanently. But I knew it would be good to cut back. So, here’s what I decided to do: Rather than attempting to cut out or cut down on these three vices, I’d resist only one of them each day. And here’s the genius part: I would give myself permission to completely indulge in the other two.

On no-alcohol days, I can eat starches and smoke. On no-smoke days, I can eat starches and drink. On no-starch days, I can smoke and drink. On my no-alcohol days, for example, I not only give myself permission to eat pasta and smoke cigars, I allow myself to eat myself sick and smoke my tongue off.

In other words, I don’t think about what I can’t do. I relish what I can do.

I realize how mad this sounds. But it seems to be working. In three weeks, I’ve lost 10 pounds, which is the “right” amount of weight loss for someone my size. But what I’m happiest about is how easy this system is to follow. Since the day I started it, I haven’t cheated once. Because I’m focusing on the two bad habits I can indulge in, the giving-up part is easy.

I’ll keep you informed on how it’s going. In the meantime, don’t try this without consulting with your doctor. And perhaps your therapist.

What I Believe: About Wars

Proxy wars don’t work: Since the US military industrial complex was established after WWII, its lobbyists, in collusion with Congress, have kept America in nearly continuous wars (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) for 70 years. None of these, we know now, were about defending our borders, let alone defending our principles or anything else. They were proxy wars, which can be put into place without Congressional approval, and the accounting for them can be easily obscured. None of these wars made America any safer. None made her any stronger. All of them, however, were massively expensive – both in terms of dollars and lives.

Neither do ideological wars:  In 1964, President Johnson initiated another kind of war – the ideological war. His was the war against poverty. Since then, we’ve had the war against drugs, the war on terror, and, most recently, the war against COVID. Like military wars, these wars have been costly and ineffective.

Here’s something you don’t know about me. I once worked as a maid.

For several months in my late teens, I took a job working evenings for an employment agency. The job was cleaning offices. It was dull and tedious, but I secretly enjoyed it. Like Molly, the simple-minded protagonist of Nita Prose’s The Maid (see “Worth Reading,” below), I enjoyed restoring those human habitats to “perfection.”

And of the many duties of an office maid, the one I enjoyed the most was the one that I should have enjoyed the least: cleaning the bathrooms. I can give you two answers as to why that was.

First, because the pleasure I got from cleaning was dependent on the difference between the before and after. And bathrooms provide the greatest contrast.

Second, as the oldest boy in a family of eight children, my Saturday chore was to clean our one-and-a-half baths. I once complained about this degrading chore being mine and not my siblings. To which my mother replied, “But, Mark. There is no one that can clean a bathroom like you.”

Looking back at that now, I believe she was humoring me. But as a seven- or eight-year-old, I took it as a compliment. (I’ve always been a sucker for compliments.)