Winning by Losing

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By Dan Wilcock

The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to explore how character and mindfulness influence a life lived well. Last week the center published an article called Failure Makes You a Winner that rang true to me.

The power of failure is available to anyone flexible enough to learn from it and not give up. Failure is a teacher. It guides us, corrects us, and, when encountered with the right frame of mind, strengthens us. It is encoded in any form of mastery built on apprenticeship, which is a form of controlled failure.

Failure also sets the context for life’s sweetest victories. I believe that Tom Petty had it right when he sang “even the losers get lucky sometimes,” (if I ever owned a minor league baseball team, that song would play every night.)

Finally, failure sometimes saves us from dead ends by deflecting us from them. Didn’t get that job, you coveted? Well, you just saved yourself years of misery. Couldn’t score those drugs you wanted? Well, at least you’ve still got those brain cells. This is an area where grace can enter our lives.

That doesn’t mean that failure’s not tough and it doesn’t hurt. That’s why I agree with the author of the article on failure, who writes “heroes share a key quality: GRIT.”

Running is UP

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By Dan Wilcock

Running is UP, with intentional uppercase–both the opposite of DOWN and its antidote. It’s an energy amplifier that feeds most properly on energy. It’s an awakening for the cells–a form of mild creative destruction for muscles, blood and brain.

I recently tried running with some down elements, specifically “downtempo” music (i.e Massive Attack, which I love in other moments). ‘Twas like a wet blanket on my run. Led Zeppelin and the Beastie Boys are more in the spirit of running’s UP. Just a few tracks from Houses of the Holy and Hello Nasty make me “run the marathon to the very last mile.”

Coffee and tea fuel running’s UP. Alcohol, in moderation, is the preserve of the day’s-end wind down.

The wind down and DOWN are equally essential. Yin rests within and without yang and vice versa. DOWN has a different role, without which we couldn’t live. UP all the time = insomnia and frayed nerves.

To keep each day’s wind up and wind down in balance, for me running UP is best done when I get up. Ordinarily getting up at 5:30 would make me tired, but running’s energy boost balances out the few minutes of lost sleep.

It’s not surprising that Bob Marley, who rose from rural poverty to become a global messenger for peace, love and unity, was an avid runner. He also loved soccer, which is mostly running. He sang Get Up Stand Up about overthrowing oppression. He was UP until cancer brought him down.

All of us eventually go down, as the leaves on trees. But running is a way to celebrate and intensify the UP within.

Mr. Salty Cracked Me Up

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Photo by Dan Wilcock

Photo by Dan Wilcock

By Dan Wilcock

I haven’t been spending much time in the interior lanes of supermarkets since reading a bunch of books by Marion Nestle and Michael Pollan, two fearless writers who have taken on the food industry. Both point out that the interior lanes of the supermarket are ground zero for the long-lasting highly-processed gunk that makes corporations big bucks and make people sick.

That’s why when I ducked into aisle 8 last week to get some crackers to go with some brie I’d picked out, I was stopped in my tracks by a product that epitomized with hilarity the inner-aisle phenomenon: Mister Salty.

I mean, come on. The marketing crew must have had fun with that one. They probably had a whole bunch of names up on the white-board. Despite hours spent brainstorming names that might make an erstwhile health-conscious person buy pretzels and processed cheese in cellophane packs, Mr. Salty was just too good to resist.

Honesty. I love it.

Now if they’d just rename bologna “Mr. Fatty,” cigarettes “Mr. Ashy Emphysema,” and chili and beans, “Mr. Gassy,” we’d be living in a new world of truth and light.

Amherst’s Faculty: Dignity and Solidarity over MOOCs

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By Dan Wilcock

The 70 to 36 decision by faculty members at Amherst against accepting an invitation to join EdX, a pioneer in the field of massive online open courses (MOOCs), signals to me that there’s some hope for higher education.

EdX is good at making education more widely available. For millions of people around the world who might not otherwise be able to catch a glimpse of a Harvard classroom, much less matriculate in Cambridge, MOOCs offer the educational equivalent of window shopping. It will never be like sitting in the classroom and interacting with the professor, but you can see what the class has to offer. Even if you never “own” the class in the form of a something that will add up to a degree, you can be get the gist of a topic and self-study your way to mastery.

I think the profs at Amherst, one of America’s best liberal arts schools, placed the right bet. MOOCs are part of the pattern that Jaron Lanier describes in Who Owns the Future?, a fantastic book published this month, in which “ordinary people will be unvalued by the new economy, while those closest to the top computers will become hypervaluable.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education article cited above states that EdX, which was founded by Harvard and MIT, has only 12 partner institutions, but has received membership inquiries from 300 colleges and universities. A lot of schools want to get on this bandwagon. Yet Amherst, when offered a coveted seat  “closest to the top computers” (to use Lanier’s terms), it did two remarkable things:

  • It put the choice to a real vote among the faculty
  • It allowed faculty members, many of whom have clearly thought through the implications of building a video database that may threaten their livelihood and those of their peers, to frame the debate

This example of democracy and public reasoning leading to a rejection of a coveted invitation from Harvard/MIT to join the shiny-new-cloud solution to higher education is refreshing to witness. The faculty committee is correct to observe that MOOCs will “enable the centralization of American higher education.” Whether MOOCs will “create the conditions for the obsolescence of the B.A. degree,” is something I’m not qualified to judge, but viewing the stakes starkly demonstrates wisdom. Putting lectures in the cloud may seem smart today, but when thousands of professors start to get laid off it will be clear exactly whose lives the technology intended to disrupt.

I don’t support the educational bloat and skyrocketing tuition that have led to the educational bubble, but I also don’t support laying off massive numbers of people who are central to America’s character. When the bubble pops, the MOOCs will be a convenient cost-cutting tool. In the Amherst committee’s language, I sense they are proactively voting in solidarity with professors across the country.

As I wrote before, I don’t think MOOCs spell the end of higher ed. Amherst’s wisdom makes me more confident in my prediction.

Screen in, speakers up, left pocket

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The iPhone was designed to be kept in a front pocket. Harder to lose a $600 computer when it’s screen in, speakers up, left pocket (for non-southpaws like me). 

Last month I learned this the hard way when I lost track of my iPhone 5. As a result, I’m a slave to Verizon for 2 more years. 

This blog post is being composed on my replacement phone, which will promptly be returned screen in, speakers up, left pocket.

Blogging on a phone is tough. I’ve been fighting with autocorrect all the way.

 

MOOCs don’t signify the end of higher ed

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By Dan Wilcock

Recently I’ve been taking a massive open online course (MOOC) from Harvard via EdX. The course, called Justice, is a compact primer on the major philosophies that frame contemporary ethics.

The idea to take the class came from a New York Times column that identified Justice as EDX’s first humanities course. As a lifelong learner and believer in the value of a liberal arts education, I figured I’d give it a shot.

The instructor, Michael Sandel, strikes me as an ideal instructor for exposing hundreds of thousands of people to thinkers like Bentham and Kant. He delivers his lectures with precision and, as far as I can tell, rises above offering any opinion himself. The class itself is pretty simple: lecture videos and required quizzes with some optional forums and reading links thrown into the mix.

It’s been a pleasant way to pursue some extra-curricular education.  Yet right now I think MOOCs are closer in value to checking out a stack of books from the library than being a member of a scholarly community.

Unless MOOCs become substantially more interactive, shifting the work of universities to the equivalent of advanced online customer service, I don’t think they spell the end of higher ed. They are simply too passive. In a world in which access to information is becoming rapidly democratized, the kind of information that MOOCs provide is becoming cheaper than ever. If technology puts that information at your command whenever you need it, the utility of having slogged through a ton of online lectures may be marginal at best.

Rather than being a harbinger of doom, I think MOOCs will force universities to offer a better value to students. Far too many families have paid far too much money in America for information-dump classes. I hope that universities begin to use MOOCs so students can get these preliminaries out of the way. Classroom time can be reserved for the good stuff: sharing a journey with an expert guide, learning the essential interpersonal art of persuasion, exposure to the idiosyncrasies of peers, testing and revising one’s ideas through debate, working on teams and contemplating lessons in daily life.

I know this may sound overly idealistic, perhaps credulous. I realize that college is also a place where young people go off to over-priced summer camp characterized by climbing walls and bad beer in red cups. MOOCs won’t change who 20somethings are, but hopefully they’ll inspire universities to be a bit better.

Franklin’s Wisdom: Don’t Be a Croaker

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Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin with the expression he might have worn when he wrote of croakers (image: Wikimedia Commons)

By Dan Wilcock

I can only imagine the expression Benjamin Franklin wore when he wrote the delightful passage below in his autobiography. My guess is that he either sported a lopsided grin or pursed lips and twinkling eyes. At any rate, as with the best parts of the autobiography, Franklin’s discourse on “croakers” is a hoot that nonetheless contains some very sage advice.

“There are croakers in every country, always boding its ruin. Such a one then lived in Philadelphia-a person of note, an elderly man, with a wise look and a very grave manner of speaking; his name was Samuel Mickle. This gentleman, a stranger to me, stopt one day at my door, and asked me if I was the young man who had lately opened a new printing-house. Being answered in the affirmative, he said he was sorry for me, because it was an expensive undertaking, and the expense would be lost; for Philadelphia was a sinking place, the people already half bankrupts, or near being so; all appearances to the contrary, such as new buildings and the rise of rents, being to his certain knowledge fallacious, for they were, in fact, among the things that would soon ruin us. And he gave me such a detail of misfortunes now existing, or that were soon to exist, that he left me half melancholy. Had I known him before I engaged in this business, probably I never should have done it. This man continued to live in this decaying place, and to declaim in the same strain, refusing for many years to buy a house there, because all was going to destruction; and at last I had the pleasure of seeing him give five times as much for one as he might have bought it for when he first began his croaking.”

My translation: doomsday is overrated. We can always see it coming if we look for it. For a budding entrepreneur, as Franklin was at this stage of his life, croakers aren’t the best people with whom to hang around.  Their “certain knowledge” of our “sinking” state of affairs and impeding ruin foster the wrong mindset.

I don’t think Franklin is advising that we discount risks. He’s no fool. Rather, I think he’s saying that focusing exclusively on risks may be the biggest risk of all. The moral of the story can be seen when the croaker forks over five times what we would have for a house if he hadn’t believed that Philadelphia of the 1700s “was a sinking place.”

I think we can forgive Franklin for the schadenfreude he displays here.  The cheery sagacity with which he tells this tale makes it a classic.