Month: May 2013

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.