Second Acts in American Lives, Time Magazine Essay, March 3, 1968

It's never too late to get it back

Like any crisis, the existential angst of midlife is an opportunity for reinvention. It’s the classic scenario where we wake up and realize that the things we’ve been working so hard for either continue to elude us, or else attaining them leaves us feeling empty. We start reassessing the value of things we once deemed so important. We’re searching for something but we don’t know what it is.

Reinvention is as scary as it is liberating, which is why most guys just buy a boat. But of course, this doesn’t really change anything. It’s just a diversionary tactic.

In the limbo of midlife, we maybe unfulfilled by the life we’ve created, but at least we know what to expect. Faced with the daunting prospect of changing careers or becoming a distinctly different version of the person we have been, most will concede defeat and learn to accept their situation. In economic terms, this is what’s known as sunk costs. We don’t want to keep throwing good money after bad, but we don’t want to have to give up something we’ve committed ourselves to for so long, even if it’s no longer meaningful to us. It would mean invalidating or calling into question everything we ever thought was important.

The anxiety we feel in midlife is that we’re at the point of no return, and that we would lose much more by starting over. For those who find themselves in such a bind, there’s a great quote from a character in AMC’s Mad Men who goes from being a housewife to her husband’s business manager. She says, “This is America. Pick a job and become the person who does it.” What I love about this quote, is that it’s not really about jobs or being American. It could just as well be, “Pick your life and become the person who lives it.” The character, Bobbie Barrett, appears in a later episode and gives this same advice to an aspiring young female office worker, saying, “You have to start living the life of the person you want to be.”

Who we want to be is not defined by the things we have, but by the values we hold, like confidence, passion or generosity. Driving a convertible won’t change our life, as much fun as it is. Living the life of someone who is free may mean no longer having to drive everywhere. We’re then free to bike or walk or stay home. In Seattle, my wife and I have learned to appreciate taking the bus. Freedom isn’t only mobility, it’s choosing the form of our mobility.

What started me writing this post was the birth of our daughter yesterday and the realization that it’s really never to late to choose your life. Sure there’s a biological cutoff point to having kids and we wouldn’t have been able to were it not for some medical wizardry, but there are many ways to be a parent. We never really ‘have’ kids, anyway, we just take care of them for 18 years. If we want to be a loving mentor to a young person, there’s no reason to limit ourselves to a traditional parent/child relationship. Were we unable to give birth to this little girl, I’m sure we would have found other ways to be loving parents in one form or another.

When is it too late to quit your job? To learn ballet? To get sober? To say ‘Thank you’? To play an instrument? To repent? To get back together? To stop blaming yourself? To fly a helicopter? To apologize?

You already know the answer: never.

I must make me let myself out!
(Photo by Jess Griffiths)

We can cloak our desires in any religious garb, but seeking to be ‘good’ is no different than seeking to be ‘bad’, which are just situational inventions by which we label the actions or results of our desire. We can’t stop ourselves from wanting something, we can only choose to want something else. It’s maddening for us to want to stop our self. This is like saying I want me to not want something. It’s the snake eating its own tail.

We are results seeking animals, created to seek fulfillment of our desires. When one is fulfilled, we cannot help but want another. This endless cycle is what Buddhism calls Samsara (the wheel of suffering), because we can never fulfill every desire and every desire leads to another, which traps us in a routine of endless wanting and unfulfillment. But the trap is not desire, it’s attachment; longing for the past or a tomorrow that never comes.

When we’re attached to a desired outcome and it goes unfulfilled, we suffer. We may become obsessed with trying to understand why it didn’t go according to plan, or try different tactics to make it happen. We learn that persistence pays off, but mostly we just repeat the past and continue get in our own way.

How can we want something and at the same time not be attached to it? It seems like a lie to say “I’m really hungry but if I don’t eat, that’s OK too.” There’s a false choice between the fatalism of believing it’s all in God’s Plan and the nhilism of nothing really matters. To release ourselves from the trap of endless wanting is not to deny ourselves the pursuit of pleasure or to let Jesus take the wheel. The open secret to continuous fulfillment is to abandon ourselves to the wanting of everyday life without becoming fixated on a Right Way of doing it. As my meditation teacher taught me in Sri Lanka over 25 years ago, “Enlightenment is right under your nose”. In other words, be mindful of the present moment, and everything mysterious and wonderful will reveal itself to you.

In the words of Chinese Zen master Linji:

You must not be artful. Be your ordinary self. You yourself as you are. That is Buddha dharma. I stand, I sit; I stretch or I eat; I sleep when I am fatigued.
The ignoramus will deride me but the wise man will understand

The harder we try to understand what happiness is, the more it eludes us. The harder we work towards being perfect, God just moves the goalposts.

And so we suffer, like hungry ghosts, trapped in the duality of who I am vs. who I should be, or what I should do or have. This doesn’t mean we should abandon all of our noble goals. Most of my career has been spent teaching people how to enjoy the process of the present while working toward a self-owned meaningful future, without being afraid to fail spectacularly in the process.

Anyone who buys into the spiritual racket that we must sacrifice, pray and suffer to attain some kind of enlightenment, is condemned to a lifetime of self-frustration, fear and guilt. We are stuck with ourselves, so we might as well dispense with all the spiritual phoniness and get on with sharing the joy of creating. When we look to the heavens or gaze at our navels in search of Ultimate Reality, we take our eyes off the beauty of ordinary life, and miss the perfection in ourselves and the creation of everything around us.

To abandon ones’e self to ordinary life, without getting tripped up in circular philosophical arguments or trying hopelessly to understand what God wants, is to know what God wants. To abandon our beliefs about The Path to salvation, is to be truly saved.

“You’re free to do as you like and also as you don’t like, to be free and to be bound, to be a sage and a fool.”
– Alan Watts

Life is not easy. I could tell that in his utilitarian Chinese way, he was being compassionate and that he understood that as long as there is perceived scarcity and competition for resources, people need government to keep the peace. This then made me think about how his idea is a vicious circle of tightening control, as people become more prosperous, they feel a greater need to protect what they have, whereas a key goal of my life is to require as little intervention as possible from well-meaning authorities. This is because I am not playing the same game. I strive for excellence but I do not compete or work in the traditional sense, so I’m not motivated by the same rewards.

I don’t feel superior about this in any way. I’m not afforded the luxury of my life because of any great material wealth, nor do my choices center on these considerations. I gave up long ago on traditional definitions of success, by creating my own game and inviting my friends to play.

The game I’ve created and continue to evolve in a modest way is called, “Life on your terms” and it is addictive. Because once people realize that they have the power to influence and expand the field of play, they become a creative force that redefines the game itself. This has worked out well, as those playing in my game bring unique competencies that I don’t have, like patience, numeracy and a capacity for doing the things that I don’t enjoy doing. This diversity makes for very powerful evolutionary force that has unpredictable outcomes.

What makes this game different? For starters, it isn’t dependent on common definitions of win and lose. I lose all the time. I have lost more than most people could bear. I wish I could say, like Nitsche, that this suffering has somehow made me stronger, but it hasn’t. I don’t know what stronger is. Stronger than whom or what? If anything, it has exposed my weaknesses for believing in the power of human will and of karmic justice. Perhaps most humbling, was that the Jobian tests I’ve endured proved to me how truly random life is, and how little say I have in the outcomes of events.

In such trying situations, the framework of belief around working hard and being rewarded, and doing good to be favored in the eyes of God goes right out the window. What is left is an appreciation for the power of the moment, of stillness and beauty and the changing light of the day. Adversity strips us down to our essential nature, which is confused, naked beings, making up stories to console ourselves. These posts are my stories. The’re not written for you, they’re written for me. They’re a substitute for routines, spiritual safety nets and predictability. Had I chosen the way of these things, I would not feel compelled to write, as life would be writing me.

Because there is perceived scarcity and so many people people live in the fear of losing, a loving, just God is essential. Without fear, God becomes irrelevant, and we are left to explore our perceptions of the world, rather than accept how it has been perceived for us. This is really the heart of my game; the unending reinvention of self in the pursuit of creating a less fearful world. I wish I could say that somehow I’ve transcended it all, but from time to time I’m smacked down by my own insignificance and realize that I really have no idea what’s going on. Anyone who tells you, no matter how well intended, that there is a plan for you, is either lying, trying to sell you something or both. You are the plan.

Life on your terms is rich and unbounded. I’m frequently overwhelmed by how much is available and will choose on a whim, because I have no sense of certainty or destiny. Maybe that whimsy is my gift; the ability to stand at the helm of my life, seeing a distant spit of uncharted land and making for it, having no real idea where I’m going or what lies beyond. What that destination may yield is no better or worse that my present course, and I am steering this life by a mysterious procession of ancient light that gives me only the most basic orientation. Being comfortable with this, enjoying it and bringing others aboard to share that enjoyment is the best I have to offer. For now anyway, that is enough.

Did you mean "Drinking alone by Moonlight"?

That sounds bad, doesn’t it? All of our English words for drunkenness only imply degrees of impairment, and conjure images of having injured and/or soiled ourselves in the process. I can’t think of any really happy words for drunk, just smashed, hammered, wasted and the like. And here I am, enjoying several beers in my garden, really savoring the serenity of every moment. Not because I have to wake up to a life I don’t like in the morning, but the opposite. I don’t drink to forget my circumstances, because I love my circumstances, which include the freedom and enjoyment of getting drunk at home.

Drinking at home is so underrated, I don’t know even where to begin.

My wife, who is Thai, doesn’t get it. Drinking is strictly a social thing to the Thai. We have bottles of whiskey at home, but only take them out for company. Without people to get drunk with, the whole exercise is wasted. No pun intended. For pathology obsessed Americans, getting drunk alone is a sign of some kind of disorder, or that you live in a trailer. Yet sitting here under the wafting fragrance of our plumeria trees, all is right in my little world.

I’m not sure why people feel they have to drink around other people. Maybe so that everyone feels comfortable to tell each other things they normally wouldn’t. For me, I see more problems going out than staying in. First, when you go out and have a few, and if you are a man, every other man is either a. your best friend, or b. your sworn enemy. Getting drunk at home significantly reduces the chances of encountering either, therefore eliminating the embarrassment of morning after bromance or multiple lacerations.

Getting drunk in a bar is kind of dumb. It’s expensive, and frequently humiliating depending on how many people you interact with over the course of the evening. You will likely make very poor choices in forming new relationships and end up regretting what little you can remember. Bars are for people who have nowhere to go, so they go out. Think about it: all the people you’re meeting in the bar, they have nowhere better to go. So eveyone is out with nowhere to go. If you actually liked the people you’re with in the bar, why not invite them to your place to drink?

There are exceptions. I joke that I bought our place in Seattle based on its proximity to an excellent drinking establishment called, Beveridge Place, because it is literally staggering distance from the house. Oh, and it also serves 25 local brews on tap, and allows dogs, AND has foosball, shuffleboard and lesbians. They don’t serve food, but here’s the best thing: you can order in from any of the 20 or so awesome restaurants in the neighborhood, like Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mexican, a different Mexican and Korean BBQ. This is not so much a pub as an out-of-body experience.

But Beveridge Place aside, there are few places that top drinking at home. And technically, I’m not drinking alone; my wife is inside with her TV show on, and the dogs are asleep at my feet.

This is not a regular thing. I’m more of a binge drinker, but that again sounds bad. Binging makes it sound like I abstain most of the time and then drink so much in one night I wake up in another county dressed as a cowboy, not knowing how any of this transpired. Binging to me just means, most of the time I choose not to drink, and then tend to make up for this in a relatively short period of time. As long as I don’t injure myself or others in the process, it’s a lovely occasional treat. As goes the motto of Duff Beer: “Binge responsibly”.

I feel that so many people are seriously missing out on the beauty of responsible drunkenness. I’m going to finish my Heineken now and then go watch an episode of Deadwood. It’s a wonderful life.
Drinking Wine, by Tao Qian (365-427 CE)
(translated by William P. Coleman)

I’ve made my home among people,
yet I hear no noise of cart horses.

You ask how am I able to do that?
A heart in a far place seeks its own.

I pick chrysanthemums from the east hedge
and gaze, at leisure, on South Mountain.

In this mountain air, day is beautiful — and night too;
birds fly out, then return together.

These facts all have a clear meaning;
I want to argue for my points, but already forget to speak.

I’m preparing to give a workshop (playshop) in June at the Yangshuo Mountain Retreat called, Breakthrough Strategies for Attracting Wealth. While the name might suggest it’s all about money, it’s really about self-awareness. The Get Rich gurus of the world would have you believe that by teaching you some secret laws of money, you can master the zero sum game. This post is for those who believe that there’s more to wealth than money and reveals strategies of the inner game we can use to enjoy the process of creating it.

I’ve never taught this workshop before. Well, not exactly. I’ve been teaching it to fortune 500 Companies for years, since those are the people who were paying me. So I was really focused on increasing wealth for the client, by helping managers build their productive capacity. Because it’s widely believed that when everyone is more productive, the company makes more money. But wealth creation goes far beyond simple productivity.

Over the past 15 years, my work in China with GE, Nike, P&G, Wrigley and the like, was a bit cheeky. You could say my motto was, “Workers of the world, relax”. Instead of talking about how to be more productive, we talked about how to be happy at work. And sometimes this requires doing less, or doing something completely different. After all, there’s plenty of data that links happiness with higher productivity. These workshops were more of a thinking space to create  insight for participants and raise awareness of choices that would best leverage their talents and passions.

I believe that wealth is created at the confluence of talent, passion and environment to satisfy some greater need. It flows from fulfillment of creative challenge. To leverage our capacity to create wealth, we must develop a conscious awareness of who we are in the process in terms of what we value, and how our definitions determine our outcomes. We deploy these strategies through an elegant and powerful personal leadership model called the Leadership Diamond^®.

Over 10 years ago, I read an interview with Dr. Peter Koestenbaum in FastCompany called, Do you have the will to lead?. Dr. Koestenbaum is a classically trained philosopher with degrees in philosophy, physics, and theology. He works with CEOs around the world on helping them be better leaders by first wrestling with the question of what it means to be a successful human being.

As I read the interview, I realized his was a powerfully different way of thinking. Koestenbaum’s provocative ideas go to the very heart of what it means to lead, by leading yourself before you can lead others. I was so inspired by his approach, that I immediately ordered his book, Leadership, the Inner-Side of Greatness, which really clarified for me the importance of first being, not doing, as the prerequisite for successful leadership.

It was in this book that I came across Koestenbaum’s transformational Leadership Diamond^® Model. Of all the models that I’ve seen from business minds in the last 20 years, this one creates a whole new paradigm.

I believe that the purposeful pursuit of the greater good is what generates wealth and grows our capacity for greatness, which is at the heart of Koestenbaum’s model. And it compels us to embrace the ambiguity and contradiction that’s inherent in this greatness. Each orientation of the model is in opposition to another which means we must explore and find a balance for ourselves between them.

When I have an idea for a project that resonates with my values (creativity, abundance, mobility, beauty) I explore it through the Diamond’s orientations and clarify my purpose.

Ethics: Whom does it serve and how?

Courage: What am I willing to do/not do or be/not be to achieve it? What am I willing to give up? What cannot be compromised?

Vision: What does this look like 5 or 10 years from now? How would I paint the ideal?

Reality: Where am I now? What resources do I have? What administrative discipline is required?

I suspect the reason that Koestenbaum’s ideas haven’t made it into the popular culture, is because the average person is uncomfortable with ambiguity. The cognitive dissonance one must face in this process gives most people a headache. People want easy answers; practical tips and tricks. Like how to find a better job, how to save more money, how to make smarter investments, or somehow beat the system. But the mark of a great leader is being able to hold two opposing ideas in mind at once. That is the beauty of the Leadership Diamond^®. You envision yourself as wealthy while acknowledging the challenges of day-to-day reality. You are serving others by serving yourself.  You value sacrifice without sacrificing what you value. The paradox of our condition holds great rewards if we’re willing to take a hard look at ourselves.

Most people think about the endgame of wealth in terms of material prosperity, which is what drives their productivity. But this is an outside-in approach that values affluence for its own sake. And as Koestenbaum notes, there is a kind of wealth porn in our society that idolizes business leaders. It ignores character and focuses on profit. Through my own explorations of the Diamond, I found that I was stuck on always being the nice guy, and didn’t have the courage to say no. This was a problem of ethics, because I would promise things that I couldn’t deliver on and then in the end, I wasn’t being of service.

The power of “No” was huge for me, and I have Koestenbaum to thank for this. The more I said “No” (forget the Jim Carrey movie), the more I was able to focus on the “Yes”. If you are one of these “Yes” people who is overwhelmed, not happy with what you’re getting and looking to focus on what you value most, please read this superb article by Tom Chiarella in Esquire. In fact, I recommend it to everyone. By saying “No” to the things that I thought once mattered, I realize they didn’t really matter and made more room for the wonderful things that did.

By working from Koestenbaum’s model in my own life, I’ve been able to focus on the things I love and attract significantly more wealth. Because of this, I deliver my workshop with authenticity, as someone who has really benefited from using such powerful new thinking tools. I believe that the joy of sharing these ideas is something that contributes to my wealth by making the pie bigger for everyone. And what’s not to love about pie?

Woody Allen had it right. Eighty percent of success is just showing up. And showing up is about being present to the myriad opportunities around us. When we work hard, we’re too exhausted to show up. We’re blind to the bigger picture of what the will of heaven is making available. While we may be committed to a higher purpose or a noble ideal, achieving it doesn’t necessarily mean hard work, but rather engaging people in our vision of that future, being resourceful and creating a sense of inevitability around an outcome. People always trump wealth and wealth always trumps timing, or as Mencius said, “Tian Shi is inferior to Di Li, Di Li is inferior to Ren He.”

Hard work means we must struggle to get what we want. While everything is available to us, we tend to settle for what we think we deserve. If we work less hard, we believe we’ll receive a proportionally lesser reward. Likewise, we expect that our future will continue to be more of what we already have. So we get up at the crack of dawn, drive long distances, hypnotically pound out dozens of e-mails a day, attend soul-crushing meetings, eat out of a box, come home in the dark and crash in front of the TV. If we’re lucky, we might have energy to go the the gym, to work on our abs.

Believe me, when I’m passionate about something, when I’m really committed to a project, I put in a lot of hours, just ask my wife. I will apply myself well into the night and don’t really recognize weekends or other conventional human schedules, like sitting down for meals. I graze, I pace, I stare out the window, I scribble furiously. But I don’t work hard at any of these things. I am wholly engaged in creating a confluence of Tian Shi, Di Li and Ren He. It’s like hard work, but minus the drudgery, toiling, strain and moil. It’s more like creating a path for the people, wealth and zeitgeist to move the project, vs. me having to move it, which as I know from rich previous experience, sucks in every regard.

So what’s the difference between working hard for success and what I am proposing? One word: joy. Any time you find yourself asking, “Why is this so difficult?” or “Why am I always the only one who…?” it means you’re engaged in a struggle against the people, place or will of heaven. Even when I go for a run, I make a point to enjoy it for it’s own sake and stop expecting to become fit. Fitness is hugely overrated, while competing against yourself in a quest to be great at some physical endeavor, that’s fun. If it hurts, don’t do it. If it moves you, do more of it.

Being a white western male born into an intellectual family and who had the privilege of attending private schools, you could say that Tian Shi, Di Li and Ren He are already somewhat on my side. Yet there are plenty of people like me who are miserable, who toil in obscurity, who wonder why they can’t catch a break. It’s because they’ve been trained in cultural institutions to believe that hard work is equal to success, which is a lie. It’s more like the opposite of success. When you work hard all your life but still aren’t fulfilled, something isn’t right somewhere in the Tian Shi, Di Li, Ren He.

So here’s the formula that’s based on showing up. It’s devoid of jargon, new age mysticism, and it’s free. It begins with an assessment of your values in relation to who you want to Be, what you want to Do and what you want to Have. The name of this formula is Visioneering, a term I thought I had invented back in 2005, but it turns out that Andy Stanley, a pastor in Atlanta Georgia, first wrote a kind of Christian motivational book called Visioneering in 2001. I haven’t read it yet, so I’m still not sure what God’s Plan is for me, but I’m thinking I’ll just live my life, as I don’t want to spoil the ending.

While pastor Stanley beat me to the Visioneering punch, I really like his definition of the term vision as “A clear mental picture of what could be, fueled by the conviction that it should be.” Here’s my introduction to this process:

1. What is your dream of the good life? When you picture it, what images come to mind? Describe them.

2. In this image of the good life, how do you define yourself as a human being? What matters most? Choose 5 or so of these values and write them down.

Next step, describe these values in the context of your life.

3. What would be some consistent behaviors in which you would express each one of these values?

4. What would be fulfilling as goals that each behavior would help you to pursue?

5. Define specific milestones in short to mid-term time frame for these goals.

6. Create some immediate next steps.

7. Commit to regular review of your results.

The Chinese, in contrast to the westerners to whom I teach this process, are skeptical. They ask, “Where is the Tian Shi, Di Li, Ren He? This is all about me, and I know I am powerless to effect the will of heaven”. Most have been taught to believe that they have no control over these things, and that working hard to educate their kids and take care of their parents is the primary directive around which all else revolves. Happiness is barely relevant. My answer is this: because you as an individual can control the way in which you envision your future, your commitment to that future can influence others (Ren He). By enrolling others in your vision, you benefit from their collective wealth (Di Li), both material and ideas. Through a powerful emergent entity, you achieve a new level of consciousness (Tian Shi) about what is possible.

There’s plentiful evidence for the power of this process in successful people all around us, even if they actualize it in an informal way. Most highly successful people grasp it intuitively and learn it through purposeful action. If you believe that there’s more to life than working hard for success, there’s so much to be discovered by just showing up.

Through seizing the will of Heaven,
Commanding the resources of Earth,
And possessing the relationships of Mankind that lie between,
Nothing is impossible.
— Sun Zi

A jagged-edged memento lies deep, splintered
evidence of impact scarred over.

Its shrapnel threatens something vital, tearing
open wounds with each recollection.

Where is the beer category?

The China Cornell-Oxford project (also known as the The China Project, is the most comprehensive study on the connection between diet and disease ever undertaken. The project was a survey of death rates for 12 kinds of cancer in over 2,400 counties and 880 million people, which studied the relationship between mortality rates and dietary, lifestyle, and environmental factors in 65 mostly rural counties in China.

The project was overseen by renowned researcher, T. Colin Cambell, Pd.D, a nutritional scientist at Cornell. When I read Dr. Campbell’s study findings, it compelled me to throw away more than half the “healthy” stuff in our fridge. The book examines the relationship between the consumption of animal products and illnesses such as cancers of the breast, prostate, and large bowel, diabetes, coronary heart disease, obesity, autoimmune disease, osteoporosis, degenerative brain disease, and macular degeneration.

The findings? “People who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease. People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease.”

The study made surprising discoveries that reveal how many so-called nutritional facts are demonstrably false. The most striking finding is the direct relationship between higher consumption of animal protein, including chicken and fish, to higher rates of cancer and heart disease. Those populations whose diet consisted of mainly plant proteins were healthiest and lived the longest.

You can read a summary of the study here.

The results are corroborated by WHO mortality statistics by country. Those countries who derive the highest percentage of calories from unrefined plant foods (Thailand, Laos) have by far the lowest incidence of death from cancer and heart disease (only 5%) between the ages of 55 and 75. Those countries who derive the fewest of their calories from unrefined plant foods (Hungary, USA), have the highest incidence of these diseases (90%). From this data, cancer and heart disease are almost completely preventable through a plant-based diet.

A big proponent of this science is Dr. Joel Fuhrman, who writes the blog DiseaseProof, which really impressed me, so I bought his book, Eat to Live.

Dr. Fuhrman’s plan is based on nutrient density, where you eat as much as possible of these high nutrient, low calorie foods. At the top of the list are dark green leafy vegetables, then other dark green veggies like broccoli, asparagus, then fruits, then beans then raw nuts & seeds. At the very bottom are refined oils, cheese, refined grains, red meat, and full-fat dairy. His formula is simple:

H=N/C or Health = Nutrients/Divided by Calories

So healthy diet is all about nutrient density per calorie, including vitamins, minerals, fibers & phytochemicals. Dr. Fuhrman writes, “The key to permanent weight loss is to eat predominantly those foods which have a high proportion of nutrients (non-caloric food factors) to calories (carbohydrates, fats and proteins).” Animal protein is calorie dense, but not anywhere as nutritionally dense as vegetables, and the benefits from the consumption of meat is more than offset by its disease-promoting consequences.

Supporting the risks of high animal protein intake is The Nurse’s Health Study in Boston, which revealed that lowering fat intake didn’t reduce breast cancer rates. As Dr. Furhman points out, the “low-fat” group were getting 29% of their calories from fat, which is like cutting back from smoking 3 packs a day to 2, and expecting lower rates of lung disease. Those in the study who reported eating less fat, consumed just as much or more animal protein than those on the higher fat diet, without an increase in plant protein consumption. My big take-away from this study is that longest-lived women were the the leanest and ate the most plant-based foods.

Dr. Fuhrman also cites a study highlighted in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that shows significantly increased lifespan and reduced incidence of disease in monkeys on a 30% reduced calorie diet. This doesn’t mean starvation, just deriving nutrition from less calorie-dense foods. This diet was proven to lower metabolism, inhibit tumor growth, protect against genetic damage from free-radicals in addition to raise good cholesterol and lower LDL. The original study, done at U. Wisconsin-Madison is summarized here.

Can you guess which one is older?

We’ve hear a lot of marketing noise about “boosting our metabolism” as the way to burn fat, (energy drinks are the fastest segment of the beverage industry), but slower metabolism has proven to equal a longer life in all animals. Dr. Fuhrman’s proven process is to achieve a healthy body mass index through good nutrition and exercise, lowering metabolism and offering protection from disease. Through moderate activity and a plant-based diet, there’s no need to “burn” fat, as the body won’t store it.

So the way to achieve this is to cut out meat, refined carbs like bagels, pasta and bread (even “whole grain” are mostly made from white flour), juices (liquid calories with all the healthy fiber removed), and dairy. Especially dairy. Dr. Fuhrman points out that Americans consume 5 times more calcium through milk and cheese than the average Chinese, but have much higher rates of osteoporosis. This is because only 30% of the calcium in milk is absorbed. Bok choi, collard greens and other leafy vegetables have much more calcium by calorie than any dairy product. Thinking that you’re safe with 2% milk? 35% of its calories are from fat. 1% milk: 20% from fat.

Unconvinced? A few more diary statistics:

in investigating the link between lactose (milk sugar) and cancer among the 80,000 women enrolled in the Nurses Health Study, those who consumed one or more servings of dairy per day had more than a 44% increased chance of all forms of invasive ovarian cancer than those who ate the lowest amount (2-3 servings per month). Skim and lowfat milk were the primary sources of this lactose.

a 2000 Harvard study found that 2.5 servings of dairy per day boosted risk of prostate cancer by more than 30%

One of the biggest proponents of our cultural nutrition myths is the USDA. Our govt. spends over $20b in price supports that directly benefit the beef, dairy and veal industries. This money is given to farmers to artificially lower the cost of crops fed to animals thereby helping reduce the prices we pay for dairy, beef and fowl. Fruits & vegetables grown primarily for human consumption are specifically excluded from USDA price supports. By creating a food pyramid that prominently features animal protein and grain-based products, combined with major media marketing campaigns, it’s no wonder we buy into the “got milk?” hype and “Beef: it’s what’s for dinner” mantra.

I highly recommend Eat to Live and at the very least, having a read through DiseaseProof, which backs its nutritional advice with broad scientific data. I feel like I’ve been liberated from the tyranny of protein and can already see myself as that spry monkey on the left, throwing his poop gleefully into his twilight years.

I think he may have cracked our pig Latin code...

It’s funny that Jeep of all brands nabbed this slogan before anyone else, because they’re such an unlikely candidate to represent the message. Their vehicles remind me of dinosaurs in Nike shoes; fancy iterations of a core technology (internal combustion engine powered carriage) that has evolved to a plateau in terms of its fundamental capabilities (carrying people and cargo on roads). Like the dinosaurs, the Jeep will have to transform itself by shrinking down and growing wings to fulfill the next stage of its evolutionary arc.

Which makes me ask, toward what is the Jeep helping us, its creators, to evolve? Our evolvibility is based on our propensity and agility to create change. This means increasing technical complexity and choices. Simple organisms have few choices, while we have many. So technology expands opportunities, which presents us with more choices. When we increase choice, we diversify creative techniques, maximize possibilities of self-expression and create more successful versions of ourselves.

Choice is the requisite of consciousness. We can’t say that the coffee maker is conscious when it chooses to turn itself on because we programmed it to do that. The Jeep is programmed to monitor its basic systems, but we can’t say it is self-aware. Yet what makes our DNA fold? What is embedded in the spooky behavior of entangled quantum particles? At the most fundamental level, every element of our universe chooses. Consciousness is the programming language of the universe.

Theologians and scientists say that these apparent choices are the result of intelligent design or evolution and that God or the extropic universe is behind this self-assembling system. The God we look for in the detail is not the code-writer, but the code itself. It’s the consciousness that we are helping to expand through our own evolution, by writing ever more complex code ourselves.

Kevin Kelly in his new book, What Technology Wants, refers to “The ongoing self-organizing mutability of life and mind,” to describe the way in which the code evolves. Through this process, we are vehicles, like the Jeep, for expanding consciousness, by contributing to the virtuous, self-amplifying circle of symbiosis between what we make and what makes us.

This blog is a tool for my own evolvibility, in that it allows me to explore ideas about what it means to be a successful human being. In being successful, we excel in our endeavors, amplify generosity, conviviality and self-enhancing connectivity. As we invent, we are reinvented.

“Technology,” Kelly writes, “gives us the possibility to find out who we are, or more importantly, who we might be.” The lowly Jeep may have its place in our journey of self-discovery, and we may be amazed by the places it will take us.

Check engine.

And the world answers, 'Yes'

I recognize that such lists are a great way to sell magazines, because we’re curious to know what we may be missing. We want to compare favorably to our peers and tick all the boxes. Then I thought of all the people in small towns who don’t read these magazines and don’t think in terms of bucket lists. They don’t read these magazines because they’re satisfied with their lives.

It’s the ambitious people who are dissatisfied, those who seek challenge and validation, who need to know what their goals should be so that they can create a schedule to achieve them. I am such a person. I’m restless and driven to build. Yet I know better than to buy into the idea of a bucket list. Running with the bulls at Pamplona? Meh. An African safari? I’ve seen these animals up close at Metro Zoo. The Great Pyramids? Two words: Discovery Channel. I know, “It’s different being there.” If you’ve done any of these things, I’m sure you enjoyed them and have the pictures to prove it.

Personally, I like mountaineering, yet I don’t feel compelled to complete the 7 Summits nor am I driven by making first ascents. When you take the ego out of an activity, you strip it down to its essence and enjoy it for its own sake, knowing that no one cares but you. I would never presume to tell someone that climbing a big mountain makes one’s life any more fulfilling. Ticking the boxes is for standardized testing.

Bucket lists are just another way we fool ourselves into feeling complete and have nothing to do with living a fulfilling, adventurous life. Choosing to run a marathon as a motivating goal is different from it being part of a bucket list, just so you can tick the box. Doing something for the sake of having said you’ve done it is a fool’s errand. Inspiration comes from within, when something resonates with your values. Checking things off a list is about as inspiring as grocery shopping.

I don’t have a bucket list, I have plans. But I choose to pursue them because they’re meaningful to me in terms of the person I’m becoming. They have nothing to do with who I should be, our any other external measure. So I’m not beholden to the publishing world or what my friends have done to direct me in my quest. More importantly, is that when we’re doing the things we enjoy most, we’re quietly moving toward the fulfillment of our goals; an ever-evolving success story that we alone write.

For all my purposeful goals and strategic planning, I know that all of this, like my life, is folly. There are moments when I realize that I already have everything, and nothing really belongs to me anyway. I am just borrowing this life for a while, and when I can enjoy it to enrich the world around me, that’s perfect.

A complete life is one that’s fully experienced, chosen by ourselves, our joy shared with others. This is especially true when we can find fulfillment in life’s simple pleasures. There are moments when I would happily surrender this life, losing myself in the beauty of the ordinary. My wife’s head on my shoulder. The breeze off Puget Sound. Fresh blueberries. The sun on my face. A child smiles at me.

Just like this.