Portion Control

My oldest married son, a father of three, works full time for a household name media company.  He has also suddenly become a gourmet family chef.  He recently read an alarming book titled The Omnivore’s Dilemma.   It tells the story of a catastrophic decline in the quality of our food supply.  Seems most manufactured food is full of stuff that makes us obese, messes with our metabolism, and dials down our immune system.  Our body can’t even recognize some of the synthetic foods we ingest as food at all.  It doesn’t seem to matter though; most of us are eating more calories than a football team at an all-you-can-eat buffet.  We all know this.  Even famous fatty Charles Barkley recently commented that drinking a 44-ounce soda is like “sucking a cake through a straw.”

Well, my son decided to do something about it.  So he and his wife began to plan original, home cooked gourmet meals for every night dinner.  They carefully shop for fresh, high quality real food.  And then he prepares dishes like wild salmon with white wine sauce and fresh asparagus-squash mashed potatoes.  He loves doing it, and his 3-year-old son has amazing food stories to tell his pre-school friends.  As for the family, the food shopping, preparation, dining, and clean up has become a positive family ritual.  There is only one drawback.  It costs more in time and thoughtful effort.  It doesn’t matter.  Not at all.  After he told me what he cooked for Thanksgiving dinner for 20 members of my daughter-in-law’s family, which included ingredients like truffle oil and some sort of caramelized fandango, he said he’s never going back to factory made food.  He reminded me that healthy eating can be a great source of intense pleasure when paired with thought and enthusiasm.

It strikes me that this is true of about all forms of consumption.  The day after hearing about my son’s artistic Thanksgiving dinner, my wife and I found ourselves in one of Phoenix’s new super malls.  What a scene.  Store after store with an astonishing abundance of stuff.  In many ways the obvious excesses of hyper-consumerism is like obesity.  Store after store full of empty calories.  Aisles and aisles filled with things we might buy and take home for a few months or years before they end up in a landfill.  Our homes are like a halfway house for garbage.  But then I thought about my son’s example of savoring quality, uniqueness, and taste.  It occurred to me that the upside of all of this material abundance is our unprecedented choice to enjoy prized possessions.  If we carefully shop for things the way my son shops for food, our lives can be enriched.  It seems that each of us have preferences and interests that bring us continuous, genuine enjoyment.  Things that give us a buzz no matter how often we use them.  What’s important is that we notice what few things are really important to our conscious enjoyment.  For those things we need to carefully and thoughtfully select like a gourmet shopper picking the perfect fruit.  For everything else we need to minimize.  Consumer obesity occurs when we load up on “door buster” junk just because it’s a good deal.  It’s not.  Nearly all of us have way too much stuff we don’t derive either satisfaction or utility from owning.  It’s just clutter.  It’s much more satisfying and fun to be a slow, thoughtful consumer of a few things that matter rather than inhaling the infinite varieties of double-cheese burgers served up by our over-retailed society.  More is not better.  Better is better.  And less allows us to savor the better.

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Thankful for Equality

As I think about what I am grateful for this Thanksgiving, I am preoccupied by my gratitude for the recent healthy birth of twin grandchildren girls!  And although I am deeply concerned about the world they are growing up in, one gift I treasure is that they are born in the nation founded on the principle that all of us are “created equal.”  In 1776 this was an overwhelmingly bold idea.  After all, the ancient Greeks didn’t believe it; neither did the Egyptians or the Romans.  And of course the British and European royal families and aristocrats didn’t believe it either.  Before America, your biological parents were your lottery ticket.  And there were always far more losers who were culturally sentenced to live as peasants or slaves than winners.  It strikes me that human equality as a powerful “self-evident” ideal is the affirmation of individual human dignity.  And anytime we stray from that ideal, we have hell to pay.

America’s greatest tragedy is that our founders didn’t have the courage to implement the ideals of the Declaration of Independence fully into our Constitution.  So we allowed powerful economic interests to legalize slavery.  A mistake we paid for with our most vicious war and we continue to deal with today.  Of course there has been much needless suffering and cruelty inflicted on many individuals and groups, most notably women who were somehow excluded from warm arms of equality.  It’s a difficult ideal.  It is contrary to a Darwinian world view.  The rich, powerful, and well educated are constantly tempted to look at the world and think everyone is getting what they deserve.  It’s natural because it gets us off the hook.  To believe that we are created equal takes a leap of faith.  When we only consider the wide variation in intelligence, ability, talent, strength, and beauty, it’s obvious we are not equal.  That’s what was obvious to Hitler, the Ku Klux Klan and the eugenics supporters of the early 20th century who wanted to scientifically breed only superior humans.  There are a growing number of secular philosophers and scientists like Princeton’s Peter Singer who believe it would be perfectly okay to terminate the life of a “defective” child within 30 days of birth.  Unfortunately I am not making this up.  You see in a materialist view of the world life has no intrinsic value.  You see the idea that all of us are equal in such an unequal world is a very radical idea.  But it is the bedrock of the future of civilization.

If human life has purpose, if it is somehow intrinsically sacred, then we are all responsible to one another.  If, instead, human equality is simply a sound bite left over from an idealistic age, then the future will decay into a battle of survival of the fittest.  Shouldn’t we after all just let evolution evolve?  I hope not.  I have a big stake in affirming the spiritual dignity of all; I am willing to raise my voice everyday to affirm the ideal of equality.  You see my oldest granddaughter was overcome with virtually uncontrollable seizures by age 2.  Her brain damage means she will never be mentally more than a young child.  So what’s her value?  Why it’s the same as yours and mine…infinite.  I am grateful to live in a country whose beginnings were founded on such an impractical, noble ideal.  We just need to act like we believe it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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Our Leaders Are Lost

As we look at the people who lead us or want to lead us, we must ask ourselves, “Is this the best we can do?” The next ten years will present us with moral, political, economic, military and spiritual issues no one has ever faced. But it seems like all of the people in charge are just wrestling with their own underwear. Flailing. The problem is leadership failure. Everywhere.

The world needs a new version of leadership. Just like software that needs to be updated to run more complex applications, we are in desperate need of an update. Leadership 1.0 worked in a natural world of hunter-gatherers. Leadership 2.0 brought us agriculture, cities and trade. Leadership 3.0 brought us the industrial revolution. It increased human productivity over 100 times in 100 years. But we are now victims of our own success, drowning in consumption that is literally consuming our future.

Leadership 4.0 is a new thought system. It has bigger goals, better methods and new incentives. It is not focused on sharing scarcity but creating sustainable abundance. It is not about compromise; it is the vision to optimize. To create a world with the greatest opportunity for happiness and least suffering for the most people. But it requires new “mental software.” Today we have presidential candidates that are twisting in the wind of 3.0 thinking. They have glossy words but weak ideas. They’re stuck in the little political box of what’s possible. But we will only get a sustainable future by doing the impossible. Whenever we have had to step up to greatness, we’ve established core priorities and then unleashed the ingenuity of citizens. Here are some priorities I believe are vital:

1. We are literally on the verge of economically harnessing clean renewable energy. Half-measures are just that. If we decided we have to be out of the oil import business in 10 years, we would figure it out. We must over-invest in the solution now. Doing so will save our economy and the world and get us out of the Middle East. Nothing else will. (If you think this is too optimistic, check out the 100-mile per gallon SUVs at FastCompany.com.)

2. We must educate all of our children to thrive in the 21st century. We still teach our children like the Greeks did 5000 years ago. Today, every student should be taught by the world’s greatest teachers. They easily could today via multimedia. Classes should look like the Discovery Channel, and students should put what they’re learning into practice by doing projects together. Live teachers should become tutors and mentors to make up for the collapse of the supportive family. We could do all this today. (See what George Lucas is doing with education at edutopia.org.)

3. We can only offer universal healthcare when there is universal health. If we don’t stop the escalation of health costs we will tax ourselves to death. The fastest way to reduce cost is to reduce demand. We must eat healthy, exercise and sleep. We should tax the food manufacturers who create artificial foods that poison us. If people what to slowly kill themselves, they should pay extra for the “food” that makes them sick. Meanwhile, we need to have incentives for healthy, sustainable food production and reward healthy lifestyles. (Look at the Human Performance Institute.)

4. We need to focus our economy away from consumption and toward producing value. We should promote 3 new world saving industries. 1) Zero waste manufacturing that will eventually build things out of atoms and molecules instead of iron, ore, lumber, and minerals. 2) Physical and mental health. Eradicate disease and end dementia. 3) We need to educate the world. Today there are more illiterate human beings than at anytime in history. Using technology and tutors for all cultures every human could give the gift of education to all.

If our economy reformed itself on producing value instead of buying foreign junk at Wal-Mart, our children’s future would transform. If we focused our public policy to encourage the dynamic investment of these 3 vital “industries for human abundance,” we could become the society we wish we were. (To learn more about sustainable manufacturing visit the Rocky Mountain Institute.)

Meanwhile, the “big, bold” idea I hear is the promise to cut CO2 emissions by 80% in 40 years. Or that 20% of our energy needs will come from clean sources by 2025. Hello. By then it’s all too late. My challenge to all you wannabe presidents: Wake up, step up, and offer us a new direction. Real vision. I’ve got eight grandchildren depending on it.

8 comments.

Saving the World

Last Friday I attended a luncheon hosted by Social Venture Partners, a San Diego based “Strategic Philanthropy.”  It was very exciting.  That’s because there is a positive invisible movement sweeping the world.  It’s called Socially-Strategic Enterprise.  Those are fancy words for harnessing the positive innovations and focused efficiency of free market business to do good.  To solve the world’s problems.  It’s big and it’s everywhere.  Chrysalis Staffing, a temporary labor agency in L.A., hires homeless people to provide workers for their customers throughout the city.  Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco operates many businesses including restaurants, a moving company, and a car repair shop paying and training pre-parole felon convicts as their workforce.  They have changed the lives of 14,000 former criminal employees over the past 30 years.  These are just two examples of a world-wide explosion of charities using business discipline to become self-sustaining. It’s not brand new.  Remember the reason the Girl Scouts went into the cookie business was to train self-reliance, presentation skills, accountability, and build self-esteem.  But today this model of creating a reliable income stream by developing a “mission centered” business is growing faster than the Arctic snow melt.  The reasons are profound.  We’ve got large scale, civilization ending problems rocking our entire world.

Modern life has become the 31 flavors of catastrophe.  We’ve got terrorism, poverty, epidemics, corruption, environmental destruction, resource depletion, illiteracy, and continuous large-scale natural disasters (earthquakes, fires, floods, hurricanes…), so we’ve got to do something.  Governments are principally self-sustaining bureaucracies that move slowly and often ineffectively at solving emerging problems.  They have a hard time keeping bridges from collapsing.  With few exceptions, businesses that operate on the old industrial model of capitalism are too focused on turning “things” into shareholders’ wealth to be effective at solving acute social problems.

So our times have called forth a new brand of citizen enterprise.  They come in many forms.  Non-profit and not-just-for-profit businesses are using social-entrepreneurship to take on just about every problem imaginable.  One World Health is a San Francisco based non-profit pharmaceutical company working with universities to scale up low cost cures for the diseases of the poor.  It’s run by executives with all the discipline of Johnson and Johnson.  And the world’s youth are flocking to these enterprises.  Socially-strategic non-profits are the fastest growing job market in the world growing at two and a half times the rate of private sector companies.

The biggest problem, however, is that most young citizens don’t know how to become social-entrepreneurs, so my friends and I at the American Dream Project are developing a fully accredited on-line academic course on the subject.  We will be offering this course to high school and college students throughout the world.  It’s going to be a multi-media banquet of documentary film clips, animation and student generated video.  Each student will also join a local group to do a community-based project.  Imagine millions of students doing innovative projects to improve their own communities each year.  Well, that’s what we imagine!  Right now we are working with GlobalGiving.org to raise the funds to get it launched.  If you’re interested in seeing what we’re up to with Global Giving, click here.

Bottom Line, don’t think the only stuff going on in the world is what’s on the cable news.  There are millions of people who wake up everyone morning to go to a job to make their difference.  You don’t have to take a vow of poverty.  Only a vow of meaning.

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What’s Your Sauce?

Yesterday I went to a funeral. Mary was the 94 year-old grandmother-in-law of one of my best friends, Michael. Mary is a fearless soul that left a big impression by simply being herself. Her life was the great American Dream. Italian immigrant. Little education. Came to San Diego from Chicago with her husband, Tony, in the 1940’s with zero money. Despite her and Tony’s lack of education, they did what they shined at. Cooked. They opened and ran Italian restaurants. Mary’s secret was her sauces. They were so good you’d want to fill up a hot-tub with one, turn on the jets, climb in and simmer so you could soak in the flavors. You think I am kidding. But once when she sold a neighborhood restaurant, the residents forced her to take it back because the new owner couldn’t get the sauce right even though he was using her recipes! Of course Tony and Mary saved, bought apartment buildings and built a comfortable life from nothing but their own work and mystical talent.

Mary’s funeral was not so much a memorial to her cooking, and it certainly wasn’t about her real-estate prowess. It was instead a celebration of a fearless woman. A woman unafraid to be who she was. To say what she thought with love and warmth, but most of all gusto. She understood how to create rituals for family and friends especially around food and talk. No one ever left her apartment without coffee, a home made pastry and a spirited conversation. Somehow our lives are most often a tapestry of small things that end up being the big things.

What I reflected on at Mary’s funeral is that so many of us are frustrated by our big ambitions: to be rich, influential, famous, or even just get promoted, recognized and appreciated. But life seems to have its own plan for us. I’m sure Mary didn’t know the difference she was making across the thousands of people she served, her friends, family, down to her great grandchildren. What Mary did was take the time to live her life in her way, at her pace. Her personal style was reflected in her total lifestyle. Mary was powerful. Inspirational because she was unafraid. She knew there was one thing she could not fail at if she chose not to. And that was to be herself. Her best self. The big loving self that comes from our deepest part. And of course to make her sauces.

When I work with powerful executives, the biggest problem I find is that they are afraid to be like Mary. So many expectations to meet. So easy to lose track of our own secret recipe. Perhaps our big ambition should be to live minute to minute more authentically. Surely at that we cannot fail. So what’s your sauce?

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