Reminder: A Change Is Coming 

As I said on Tuesday, I’ve decided to start publishing this blog once a week instead of twice. So, starting next week, you can expect to receive one somewhat longer issue that will include more of the investment advice and commentary on the economy that my readers have been asking for.

Question: Would you rather receive it on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday?

Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately

A Lesson I Learned Long Ago About Personal Relationships. How long have you been hoping that your friend would stop with that annoying habit he or she has had as long as you can remember? Or that your spouse would improve himself or herself in some way that would be more appealing to you and also better for him or her? How many times have you made a subtle suggestion, or a tactical criticism, or a simple plea for him or her to do something about whatever it is that’s bothering you? And how many of those efforts by you were successful?

We know the answer. Never or very rarely. And that’s because by the time Homo sapiens arrive at adulthood, 95+% of their instincts, emotional intelligence, reactions, behaviors, and habits are deeply etched into their brains.

That means you will have less than a 5% chance of ever being able to “help” a friend or spouse “improve” themself in any meaningful way. In other words, spending time, energy, and effort on trying to change anyone in your life is 95+% futile.

When I came to this conclusion, I realized that I had a choice. I could continue to try to encourage change in the people in my life and deal with the eventual disappointment years later when they did not change. Or I could accept the idea that they would not change and learn to accept them – even love them – for who they are.

There are all sorts of rational objections one could make against this approach. I know. I spent years making them. But to no avail. I ended up angry and resentful and eventually losing those personal relationships I had once valued.

Turns Out, This Is True in Business Relationships. Recently, at a business meeting, my partners and I were discussing the strengths and weaknesses of a number of our leading executives. We were talking about the various strengths and weaknesses these people bring to their jobs, and how much better they could be if they could learn to stop doing this or start doing that.

I was participating in the conversation willingly and happily when I suddenly realized that we’d been having basically the same conversation about these same execs at least a half-dozen times over the previous three or four years.

I challenged my partners with a thought experiment. “Assume, for a moment,” I said, “that no matter how much we urge them, inform them, or incentivize them, none of them will be able to change. Imagine that we had a crystal ball… that we looked five years into the future and saw that none of them had made a single substantial change. If that were the case… what would we be talking about today?”

The next ten minutes of our discussion were more rewarding than the dozens of hours we had spent devising strategies to evoke changes in these people that were never going to come.

Exceptions Don’t Prove the Rule. We can, to a significant degree, help our children terminate unwanted behaviors and develop desirable ones. Nature designed Homo sapiens to be mentally and emotionally malleable when they are young. So, although it may not seem possible, studies have shown that up to about 15 or 16 years of age, teenagers can make those positive behavioral changes. But by the time people reach adulthood, their habits and tendencies are too deeply engrained.

There are some exceptions. There are always some exceptions. But if you want to solve a problem, and especially a big, complicated problem, it makes zero sense to continue with or even double-down on a “solution” that has been failing for the majority of those involved for many years.

And yet, that is exactly what we do. We create programs – local, regional, and federal programs – that promise to solve a problem but never do. In fact, they often make matters worse! But instead of acknowledging and accepting the failure of the “solutions,” we conclude that the way to fix the failure is to spend more money on the programs. To do more of them or do them “harder.”

I’m talking about a very wide range of social “problems” here – from the failure of our educational institutions to educate, to the failure of our addiction programs to reduce drug and alcohol addiction, to our failure to reform criminals in the penal justice system.

A Change Is Coming 

I’ve decided to publish this blog once a week rather than twice. The original idea was to lighten the load for me and J, my editor. And I hope to do that. But knowing the way I work, I suspect my once-weekly issues will end up being about twice the size of my twice-weekly issues.

So, what do I intend to accomplish by making this change?

I’ve received a good deal of feedback from my readers, and I now have a better idea of what they like and don’t like. Most of what they like are the pieces that are more useful than newsy. So, starting next week, that’s what I’ll be focusing on. You can expect to receive a somewhat longer issue that will include not only the kind of bits and pieces and recommendations that I’ve been sharing with you all along, but also regular comments on the economy and investment advice.

Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately 

I don’t like the word charity. It implies a certain condescension. I don’t like referring to Fun Limón, the community center we established in Nicaragua, as a “family charity.” It sounds elitist and self-aggrandizing. I prefer to think of it as a Not-For-Profit Public Project or NFPPP (an acronym I made up that will never catch on because it would be too hard for people to remember). I believe the charitable impulse is not an a priori good. Quite the contrary, unless one works very hard to safeguard against it, it is difficult to act charitably without creating negative side effects, such as feelings of dependency and entitlement. Charity is not a divine impulse. It is a deeply human survival instinct that promotes not only the survival of one’s particular DNA, but of the species as a whole.

Because charity is so potentially dangerous in terms of creating collateral damage… I never felt comfortable giving dollars to organizations I knew next to nothing about for the benefit of feeling like I was being good and virtuous, when what I was really being was careless and self-indulgent. So, when I decided to start my own charity to help people in need, I took the responsibility seriously. My family foundation has three NFPPPs, all of them run with the same attention that we give to our businesses. Our motto: “Do less harm than good.”

I’m thinking that charities are not only like businesses in many ways, they’re also like financial investments.Stocks, for example, can be roughly divided into two kinds: growth stocks and income stocks. One buys growth stocks for future appreciation and income stocks for near or current cash flow. The one is generally about the future. The other about the now. If you consider NFPPPs from that perspective, there are projects that provide immediate benefits to the  “investors” (the people providing the funding) – e.g., the pleasure they get from seeing how their efforts have changed recipients’ lives. And there are projects that take years or even decades to accomplish, with benefits that may arrive only after the death of the “investors” – e.g., the endowment of museums, scholarships, and major cultural programs.

A Question – Believe It or Not – That Haunted Me for Years! 

Years ago, when I was actively writing short stories, I sent a dozen of them to the brother of a friend for a critique. He (the brother) was an award-winning Canadian author of novels and short stories.

Since a few of my earlier stories had received positive comments from published fiction writers who were kind enough to review them at writing conferences, I was hoping for positive feedback, since the ones I sent him (the brother) were more mature. And he was positive about some of them. But he criticized others as “anecdotes” rather than “stories.” I should have asked him what he meant by that. Instead, I spent years trying to figure it out on my own.

All those with literary ambitions believe they have at least one novel inside them waiting to be put into print and stun the world. The great majority of such people never write their stories. And of those that do, I’d wager that 90 percent of them are written as anecdotes.

What’s the difference between a “genuine” work of fiction and an anecdote?

I figured it out, finally, just recently by reading a “story” sent to me by a family member. It was a first-person account of interesting aspects of his life, strung together in a sophisticated way with a strong sense of style and abundant literary diction. It was the sort of thing you would expect to read in The New Yorker.

But I could see that it was an anecdote. It was an anecdote because it was written the way anecdotes are told – about an incident in the person’s life that he/she found relevant and memorable.

Let me try to rephrase that as a formal definition: Anecdotes are first-person, autobiographical accounts formulated and recited to document some significant-to-that person incident or incidents in his/her life. However well-written and however literary the style, the distinguishing feature of anecdotes is that they are essentially memories, embellished by pride and shame and the desire to document and validate the teller’s existence.

I published my “stories” that were the closest to actual stories in my book Dreaming of Tigers. I saved the anecdotes – dozens of them – to be reworked when I figured out how to do it. So now, I’m going to go revisit the best of them.

My initial strategy will be to revise them from the first to the third person. I’m hoping that will force me to rethink the characters and the plot from the reader’s point of view. Then I’ll read them again with these questions in mind:

* This may be interesting to me. But will it be interesting to the reader?

* This is meaningful to me. But how can I make it meaningful to the reader?

Connecting the Dots:

Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately 

Why Fixing Matches Is Good for Boxing: Years ago, a friend of mine who was a boxing promoter explained to me why boxing has a history of fixed fights. “When you have a good-looking, charismatic fighter that’s won three or four fights in a row, the fans get interested,” he said. “If he keeps winning, the gate gets big. And fast. It can go from $10,000 to $100,000 to $1 million to $10 million to $100 million. When that happens, everybody wins. The promoter, the venue operator, the boxer, the trainer, the manager – even the kids selling popcorn and hotdogs. And the fighter who takes a dive? He gets paid, too. And if the fight is good, there’s a chance for a rematch. So, you don’t need a big conspiracy to make boxing work that way. Everyone does what’s best for himself.”

How Big Fixes Work in Business: That was an eye-opener for me. I realized that the same phenomenon could occur in business. When, in any industry, the financial incentives are positive from the top to the bottom, you don’t need a big conspiracy to make a big fix happen. Big Pharma is a perfect example. There are dozens of medications and procedures recommended routinely by not just doctors but medical associations that have zero proof that they work. In fact, there are many that have been proven to be useless. So why are they still on the market? Moreover, why are they still being recommended? The answer is that whenever you have a medication or procedure that doesn’t actually kill patients, everyone up and down the chain makes money – from the companies that make the pharmaceuticals, to the associations that are supported by the drug companies, to the lobbyists that promote Big Pharma, to the legal and accounting firms that represent these questionable drugs and procedures, to the hospitals that employ the procedures, to the universities and institutions that do the studies, to the salespeople that persuade the doctors to recommend them, to the drugstores that sell them. The only people that don’t usually make money, oddly, are the doctors that prescribe them. They prescribe them because, most of the time, they believe they actually work, especially when they are recommended by such trustworthy organizations as the American Heart Association. The thinking, up and down the line, seems to be: “So long as it isn’t killing anybody, what’s the harm?” I’ve got much more on this. But I submit the thesis to you for your review.

The Difference Between Waging a War and a Family Feud: As I have said, and as the leaders of Hamas understood when they invaded Israel, the pressure for Israel to pause the war and return to negotiations for a “two-party solution” has mounted as the Palestinian body count grew. The greater the disparity between dead Palestinians and dead Jews, the stronger and larger will be the condemnation of Israel. This idea of “parity” is emotionally comprehensible, but intellectually specious. Parity makes sense and eventually works in a family feud. But it is not – and never has been – a metric for “regulating” war. War is terrible because its purpose is – and must be – defeating the enemy. And however history views it, war is justified – and always has been justified – by the claimed virtue of its cause. The US didn’t justify its role in WWI and WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the war against Iraq by how “proportionate” the body count was. (In WWII, for example, about half a million Americans were killed compared to about eight million Germans. And of those eight million, a quarter to a third of them were civilians.) I’m not defending the killing of thousands of Palestinians by Israeli bombing. I’m pointing out that the argument about proportionality makes sense only if you see this as something other than a war. We have to ask ourselves: Is it a war? And if it isn’t, what is it? An ancient family feud? An urban, police action? What do you think?

The Mentor Question: I’m having a discussion with an old friend, spurred by the piece I wrote Nov. 4 about people in my life that had a positive impact on my career. He pointed out that half the people on my list acted as mentors to me. He said that of the many people influenced him, none were mentors. He, like me, had a successful business career. But he managed to have it without the help of a mentor. Why? Was it because of the different industries we were in? Do some industries, such as writing and publishing, benefit more than others from mentor-mentee relationships? Or were our differing paths due to our individual personalities? We are both hyper-resistant to being told what to do. Nor do we like answering questions. I have a few inchoate ideas I’m tossing around. What do you think? Have mentors played a helpful role in your career?

Connecting the Dots:

Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately

This is a new column that I’ll be including once every week or two. As you can see below, it’s going to be a listicle of things that have been on my mind. Thoughts I find myself coming back to repeatedly. Ideas I’d like to write about, but, for the moment, don’t have the time to dig into and/or expand into a proper essay. So, rather than add them to my ever-expanding “to do” list, I’m going to mention them briefly and solicit your help in turning these ideas into essays by asking you to send me, if you have them, your thoughts or questions about them.

Freedom and Equality. I am beginning to see every significant political, social, and economic conflict today as a contest between two core values: freedom and equality. This includes disagreements about such otherwise unconnected controversies as racism and CRT, sexism and the pay gap, trans rights vs. transphobia, and socialism vs. capitalism. To name just a few. Think about any current issue. For example, the expanding gap, even in developed countries, between the rich and the poor. It can’t be fully understood unless examined through this perspective. Try it and let me know if you agree.

Sam Bankman-Fried. I’ve not had any special interest in this story. Scammers abound in the financial world. So, I’ve always been perfectly willing to believe that this fat-faced kid was a sleezy, unscrupulous dirtbag. But when I read about the verdict – that he was convicted of seven counts of wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering, and was facing 110 years in jail – it gave me pause. I know from experience that these three “crimes” are not, in and of themselves, descriptions of actual criminal behavior. Like RICO, they are only crimes when they are attached to actual crimes. I can’t prove this now, but I’m pretty sure they are technicalities that were invented by lawmakers years ago to put bad guys – mobsters and drug dealers – in jail for crimes the Feds could not prove. Do you see what I’m getting at?

Culture Is Everything. This is a big theme for me. I’ve wanted to write a book about it for at least 10 years. If you are a regular reader, you know that I’ve touched on it in past books and essays. But I don’t know that I’ve ever stated it clearly as a thesis. The idea is that culture – not wealth, or nationality, or race, or ethnicity, or religion – is what unites and, more importantly, divides us all. Like the conflict between freedom and equality, it lies beneath so many social and political conflicts – from war and peace, to wealth and poverty, to the most notable examples of human achievement and failure. Also like the freedom/equality conflict, unless you understand how deeply cultural ideas and values permeate everything we think, say, and do, it’s impossible to make sense of the world. It’s going to be a challenge to develop this idea, but I’m very motivated to work on it. Because so far at least, I can’t think of anything important happening in the world today (or in history) that doesn’t have culture at its foundation. I’m going to push forward on this idea. If you like what I’m doing, you can help me flesh it out with examples from your own experience and observations.

How to Understand Modern Art. Learning about art used to be like learning about any academic subject. You read books written by people who had read earlier books written by earlier people who had ideas about it. Most of those ideas had to do with how one school or style of art was developed and then went on to influence another school or style. Essentially, art appreciation was art history. And that worked well until the late 19th century, because virtually all art produced until then was representational. But when some artists started experimenting with expressionism and abstraction and eventually “found objects” and performance, it changed everything. Art became both incomprehensible and inexplicable, which could have ended it. But thanks to some very clever intellectuals, art, like physics, was reinvented for the modern world.

Question: Who Are the People That Had the Greatest Positive Impact on You?

In a video interview recently, I was asked to name the people that had “the greatest positive impact” on my life. The general topic of the interview was “business building.” So I first thought about the businesspeople I had worked for and/or with – savvy CEOs, executives, and entrepreneurs that had revealed important secrets to me or trained me in certain valuable skills.

I came up with three or four. (Which I’ll mention in a minute.) But upon reflection, I realized that the answer to that question had to go beyond my career. There were about a dozen people that had a major effect on the way I approached everything I did in every aspect of my life.

And by the way, I think this is true of everyone. Including you! So I urge you to spend some time making a list of the people that had the greatest positive impact on your life. I think you’ll find it interesting. Even eye-opening. At the very least, it will remind you of some stories you can tell your grandchildren when you’re my age. (And if your list is like mine, you may be surprised to find that a fair number of the people on your list did what they did by criticizing you.)

My List 

1. My parents. Number one. As is true of most people, they, of course, were the most influential people in my life. And I’m very lucky in that they were mostly positive and inspiring. I am still amazed when I think about how they managed to accomplish what they did in life while raising eight children. It amazes me more every time I think about it.

My mother valued art and poetry and dance and the theater. She valued honesty and frankness, hated hypocrisy, and didn’t suffer fools. She cared for and was kind to people in our neighborhood that were incapacitated.

The bulk of my father’s influence on my life came on later, after I left home. He was a literary scholar who read four or five languages and could quote Homer in Greek. He was also a dramatist, an English literature professor, and a secret math genius. He was not at all interested in sports, which irked me when I was young enough to want to play them. And he was amazingly absent-minded, which is something that has passed on to me in the last several years.

2. My fourth-grade teacher – whose name I forget, but who suggested to me that I could become a writer and challenged me to write an historical account of the Iroquois Indians, who, if I remember correctly, were native to Long Island, where we lived at the time.

3. My ninth-grade homeroom teacher, Ms. Growe – who, after making me stand up in class, said to my fellow students, “If you want to know the definition of ‘underachiever,’ Mr. Ford is a living example.” (Oddly, I don’t remember this bothering me. I was sort of proud of it. Probably because I knew it was true.)

4. Coach Dick Caproni, my high school football coach – who apparently admired the way I could run, at full-speed and head-first into just about anything he asked me to. I loved that guy. Although I’m sure I lost a few IQ points heeding his commands.

5. Lillian Feder, a classicist at Queens College – with whom I took two undergraduate courses in Greek and Latin culture. She taught me the importance of grammar and punctuation, and once allowed me to take a test over again (which she should not have) because she believed in me.

6. Harriet Zinnes, another teacher at Queens College – who taught me how to read poetry, pushed me to study Ezra Pound in depth, and made it clear to me how common it is for people that haven’t earned the right to call themselves writers, nevertheless do.

7. Peter Mustapha Lopa, my French teacher and later student and friend during my two-year sojourn in Chad, Africa – who taught me how possible it is to bridge, in friendship, insurmountable distances.

8. Leo Welt, a WWII war orphan and the founder of Welt Publishing – who hired me for the first legitimate writing job I ever had. Leo was not especially charming. In fact, he was often rude. But when it came to accomplishing any notion that came to his mind, he was a force of nature. Nothing could stop him. Leo taught me the amazing power of brute persistence.

9. Joel Nadel, a Florida-based newsletter publisher – who gave me my second writing job. And taught me how money is made and wealth is created. And gave me the chance to become wealthy myself. Joel didn’t treat everyone the same, but he treated me like family.

10. Bill Bonner, a Baltimore-based newsletter publisher – who gave me my third writing job. Bill was, in almost every respect I can think of, the opposite of Joel. And because of that, he was able to teach me that there is always more than one way to skin a cat. In other words, that every truth in life has an equal and opposite truth – i.e., don’t let someone else’s truth get in your way.

Political Culture in America Today

In my college years, I saw America’s university curriculum as a smorgasbord of diverse and delectable ideas. A cornucopia of philosophical, political, and social ideas that were, to me at the time, potentially delicious and also nutritious. I wanted to consume them all.

In contrast, the range of ideas available on social media back then (i.e., radio and TV) was very limited. It was a lonely neighborhood with a cluster of eateries, all of whose menus were comprised of the same half-dozen dishes, all based on the same half-dozen recipes, and all served with only the mildest of spices.

But it was safe and comfortable. Because when it was time to feed yourself, it didn’t matter which restaurant you chose.

When cable TV came along, the menu for new ideas promised a huge expansion as the number of channels went quickly from 13 to nearly 500. Unfortunately, the hoped-for diversity didn’t materialize. The eateries expanded by 4,000%, but the dishes available were all the same.

The internet did indeed expand the diversity of the idea menu exponentially. And for the first 10 to 15 years of this century, there was a flourishing of free ideas, opinions, and sources available to anyone that had access to the World Wide Web.

But then, sometime around 2010, all that rich, intellectual diversity seemed to thin itself out. Online searches for particular social, political, religious, and virtually any other category of collective thinking became more difficult. So difficult that it may as well have been scrubbed from the Web entirely.

Soon after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, another massive change began to take hold that eventually reduced the ideas and opinions available to knowledge seekers to just two: those of the percentage of the population that hated Donald Trump… and those of the Trump lovers.

This final reduction quickly transformed ideas and opinions (and even opinions of facts) into ideational weapons, where they have value only in relationship to whether or not they support one ideology or the other.

And that is where we stand today, with the world defined by ideological tribes that interpret every aspect of human knowledge – from history to psychiatry to medicine to art and literature – in terms of its usefulness in vanquishing (if not eradicating) the enemy.

It’s ugly. It’s also inescapable. For these competing tribal ideologies assert themselves antagonistically. Not just in everything we seek to understand about the world, but in everything we do. From the laws we pass about abortion and discrimination and criminal justice, to what we should do about the Russian occupation of Ukraine and the war between Israel and Hamas.

There is a huge intellectual and emotional advantage to this two-tribe cultural world we now inhabit. Each tribe gets to feel morally superior to the other because, having abandoned believing in the value of ideas, they have the benefit of believing that the ideology they subscribe to is not just absolutely correct, but also absolutely virtuous.

This is extremely dangerous and almost sure to end very badly for both tribes. The emotional mechanism that fuels and informs and preserves ideologies is always and inevitably not just uncharitable and anti-intellectual, it is mindlessly self-destructive.

So, yes, the two-tribe world we Americans now live in was sparked into life by the election of Donald Trump. But something else happened during the Trump presidency. A third group was formed of people that neither hated nor loved him but hated the way the Trump Haters set out to end his presidency by any means necessary. I consider myself one of that group, and I believe there may as many as ten million of us.

We cannot be identified by red hats or black masks or by the color of our skin or by our religion or lack of religion or by the level of our education. If there is something that unites us, it is the value we still hold in ideas, our deep distrust of ideology, and our unwillingness to submit our individuality to any sort of group-think.

And we could be the largest bloc of swing voters. Which would make the outcome of the next election interesting… except that we also are very reluctant to vote.

We Are So Much the Same. Then Why Are We So Damn Different?

When K and I had Number One Son, we parented him the way I imagine many first-time parents raise their children – to become, as Jordan Peterson advised, adults that we would like and admire.

Number One-Son did not disappoint. And when we had Number Two and Number Three Sons, we did the same. Again, the results were more than satisfactory.

But they are not at all the same kind of person. Their instincts, their interests, and their personal preferences are greatly different – as different as their physical features.

A common way of discussing these differences is to talk about nature vs. nurture – i.e., how much of a child’s temperament, intelligence, and personality traits are due to innate biological factors versus differences in parenting, teaching, and other social aspects of their developing lives.

Biology is definitely a factor. A much bigger factor than you might think considering that, from a DNA perspective, all humans are 99.6% the same. That tiny 0.4% difference accounts for all the physical differences – the bone structure, the height, the color of the eyes and hair and skin, etc. – not just between siblings, but among all human beings of every race.

But we also know that DNA accounts for other differences, such as temperament and even something as small as the way a child smiles or laughs. (You have your grandmother’s smile… your father’s laugh, etc.)

In fact, I think DNA goes even further than that. I’ve seen what I would call personal tics in my boys. The way, for example, that Number One Son rubs his nose that is identical to the way his grandfather, whom he never met, rubbed his nose.

As a parent, I find this eternally interesting and amusing to think about.

Recently, I was contemplating the way my children dress.

Number One Son has my sense of style – in that he always thinks he is stylishly dressed but almost never is.

Number Two Son’s sense of style is apparently (What do I know?) cool but low key.

Number Three Son’s is (again, apparently) particular and au currant. So much so that, once a year, when I visit the Chanel store on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach to buy K a few things for Christmas, the salespeople talk directly to him, not me, about what they think she might like.

Three boys with 99% similar DNA, 90% similar parenting (K did most of it and she is extremely consistent), and 90% similar childhoods in terms of the town they grew up in, the schools they went to, and so on.

Why such a difference?

I suppose it could be that small natural difference in their DNA, which does, after all, account for the very distinct differences in their physical appearances. But my guess is that it has to do with the happenstance of the particularities of the nurturing they received. Not from us, but from their teachers, their friends, and the hundreds of small but significant (to them) experiences they had growing up.

What do you think?