Today, there is a steady, inevitable growth of what many commentators refer to the “sharing economy.”  The most wellknown example of replacing sharing for ownership of a vital asset is the Zipcar business (recently acquired by Avis-Budget).  Zipcar is based on the principle that many individuals need automobiles relatively infrequently and for relatively short periods of time, so that neither ownership, nor leasing, nor even daily rentals are the most cost-efficient solutions for them.  They become a Zipcar member, rent a car for an hour at a time, pick it up at one Zipcar lot, drive it and drop it off at any Zipcar lot.

However, the sharing economy is progressing beyond the temporary use of automobiles. Airbnb is an example of a service which facilitates a process by which people may share all or part of their residences with others for a fee that, for the person needing accommodations, is lower than the cost of a hotel, and more readily available.  This service has the advantage of not only being more flexible, but enabling the use of rental property that is more conveniently located than a traditional hotel, which typically has to be in a commercially zoned part of a community.

Similarly, there are many businesses in which individuals can rent the use of a room or a suite for a meeting for an hour at a time.  Companies like Regus have a large supply of available offices for temporary use of facilities.  In my case, I have a network of friends or service providers that let me use vacant offices or conference rooms for meetings, so that I do not have to rent a very expensive hotel conference room.  The informal version of this is the use of coffee shops and restaurant spaces for regular meetings.  For example, the local coffee shops in Darien, Connecticut, where I live, are regular venues for morning and afternoon meetings, in one case,  for men’s prayer groups.  These groups do not rent a space, but simply reserve a large table and preorder breakfast or coffee for a group of 12 people.

New York City has a wonderful set of public spaces in Midtown buildings like the Park Avenue Plaza, the Sony building and the IBM building that have open lobby areas that have been converted into meeting places or even spaces where individuals can sit at a table at no cost for hours at a time.  The Park Avenue Plaza between 52^nd and 53^rd Streets between Park and Madison Avenues has gone one step further in converting a portion of its space to a group of tables for individuals to use for chess games.

A variant of this temporary use of assets is the penetration of extremely short-term rentals of equipment needed for one-time tasks often of such short duration that a purchase or even a fixed term rental is not a viable option.  My wife and I rented a dehumidifier some years ago for a period of 3-4 days when our basement had been flooded and we needed to get moisture removed from our carpet.

For communities, the use of shared services is a great alternative to having each resident separately contract for services.  My wife and I have lived in such an association for almost 20 years.  We have 19 homes, a clubhouse, two tennis courts, and significant open spaces for play areas for children.  Our lawn management, tree trimming and removal, snow removal, road maintenance, and refuse collection services are shared across the 19 residences, and, as a result, we pay far less than we would pay if each of us contracted separately for these services.

Another form of facilitated shared services is the facilitation of peer-to-peer selling of books, music, DVDs, and other tangible assets by one individual to another through sites like Amazon.com, not to mention that Amazon.com is also a major provider of shared cloud computing services.  My son James made significant money during his senior year of high school and the summer after high school collecting salable items people we knew no longer needed and selling them online to others.  He particularly helped the local Boy Scout operation sell the items that remained unsold after the annual spring tag sale.

Still another formed of shared service, which has been around for several decades, but is getting renewed life, is the use of ride-sharing for trips to and from work, and to and from places like airports and train stations. Back in the 1980’s, when I was a reverse commuter from New York to Stamford at Pitney Bowes, the Company had no shuttle service between the train station and the Company headquarters.  While I enjoyed walking between the station and my office, there were times when walking was not a practical option, typically at night when I needed to get to the station quickly to catch a train back to New York. Many people picked up and drove me to the station.  I developed some great short and long term relationships with those who regularly helped me.

What has given the sharing economy new life is the Internet, which enables those doing the sharing to have three capabilities they never previously had:

• The use of online matching between those with assets to share and those needing the use of the assets;
• An ability to get a high degree of advanced knowledge about the person providing the asset to be shared and the asset itself; and
• The ability of prior users to rate the experience and give feedback available to all future users of that asset.

For the sharing of automobiles and rides, the increased availability of insurance against both liability and damage is another factor that has enabled the sharing economy to grow, since many people are deterred by the financial risk they would appear to be taking.

I am excited about the prospect of this economy continuing to grow.  We waste and consume too much, and, by buying items, we also end up with all the burdens of ownership.

Historically, shared assets and services often got damaged more easily and got excessively intensive use, which meant that their value to others was diminished.  Cooperative associations were valued less than pure ownership situations, and the ownership of assets was associated with status, power, and freedom.

Today, the world is different.  We have virtual offices, which are enabled by our ability to stay in touch with the world via our smart phones, Ipads, and laptops.  We have more ubiquitous cloud computing, which obviates the need for us to own servers.  We also have more online networks that are changing how we share information with one another across organizational and community boundaries. The concept of sharing space and other assets is not as strange as it once seemed.

I have learned how to do more of this with the need to manage a start-up business, Dossia, and to manage our film project.  It is a wonderful trend that, over time, is making our quality of life far better than it once was.

However, some smart and rational CEOs, whose scarcest resource is time, believe that they can deliver shareholder value by putting their priorities elsewhere.  Their reasoning may be as follows:

• Traditional population health improvement programs have not worked in large organizations; and
• The best path to reduced healthcare costs may be to reduce U.S. employee headcount.

Few employees use wellness, disease management, and care management programs. Since employers usually pay a vendor fee for these programs over their entire population, they generally fail to produce a population-level economic return. Why do so few employees use them? The most obvious reason is that the vendors have no incentive to maximize participation, since it increases their costs and reduces profitability.

However, these programs fail to draw widespread participation even when employers and vendors aggressively market them. Understanding why is critical to improving population health.

Most people only use wellness programs when they can be fit into their daily life routines.  Moreover, many employees consider mandatory wellness program participation to be an unwarranted intrusion on their private lives, and a bad example of the “nanny state.”  How can employers get buy-in from all those who should use the programs?

First, employers need to educate employees that increased healthcare spending reduces the amounts available for salary increases and other cash-based benefits.  They also need to explain that uncontrollable labor costs make a wide range of headcount reduction strategies more economically viable.  What are CEOs who do not attend to improving population health doing instead?

Unfortunately for already insecure employees, one answer is that they are aggressively looking for ways to reduce U.S. headcount.  How are they doing it?

• They will substitute technology for labor wherever possible. Automated voice response systems replace human operators. Robots instead of people move physical items. Heavy equipment replaces construction workers in moving dirt.  We will also see an evolution toward the eventual penetration of self-driving automobiles, which will eliminate jobs for millions of truck, bus, taxicab and limousine drivers.
• More tasks will be offloaded to offshore workers in low labor cost markets.
• More tasks will be outsourced to more technologically efficient and enabled third party administrative services.
• More tasks will be done by contract workers of short duration, employees who are being tested in a 30-90 days “probation” period, or even unpaid interns.  Companies also refer more work to teams of undergraduate or graduate students who will trade compensation for school credit.
• Businesses create more customer self-service opportunities, as airlines have done for over two decades in creating automated reservations systems, and, more recently, automated systems for securing boarding passes.  Retailers will expand customer-managed checkout processes.  Even restaurants will move slowly, but surely, toward more automated ordering and food pick-up systems.
• Big data analytic systems will replace highly skilled human tasks, such as Amazon.com and Netflix have employed in building recommendation systems for book and movie acquirers.  Even law firms are now authorized to use technology to sort documents for responding to certain government document production requests, saving client money and lawyer labor.
• Healthcare will move from face-to-face human interactions to technology that automates physical examination, and non-invasive self-administered biometric monitoring will reduce the need for more skilled healthcare professionals.

However, CEOs are employing two other strategies as well for reducing healthcare cost burdens:

• Companies locate facilities in areas with better-educated and healthier populations, and lower healthcare costs. They require higher levels of education for each job and benefit from the fact that higher educational attainment correlates with better health.
• Finally, they substitute part-time employees for full-time employees to reduce the population for which they have healthcare benefit responsibility.

However, after they exhaust all low-hanging fruit that enables them to avoid having to improve employee health, they will realize that, for the core of their stable, mission-critical, full-time U.S. workforce, they will need a robust population health and healthcare cost management strategy.

For that population, they will need to reinforce a culture of health inside an organization by executing on strategies and tactics that improve health. They can change the daily environment in which employees function, either directly at work, or using their influence, indirectly in the community and at home.  Well-respected public health researchers like Sir Michael Marmot and Dr. Anthony Iton, (the author of a wonderful study called Death by Unnatural Causes, when he was the Public Health Director for Alameda County Californida) have demonstrated that 85-90% of what determines our health happens outside the healthcare system.  Our daily living environment drives our health outcomes much more than access to high quality healthcare.

The recently released State of Oregon study on its Medicaid population, demonstrated that while those citizens on Medicaid had easier access to healthcare and avoided financial ruin, they had no better health-related outcomes than those not participating in the Medicaid program and the total amounts spent on their healthcare were not lower.

How can an employer alter the daily working environment of employees to make it better?

• Make healthier foods and beverages and lower portions of them more affordable and accessible than junk food, although employees are less likely to rebel if they retain the choice to eat less healthy foods.
• Make all facilities tobacco free.
• Create facility plans and work processes, which induce more walking during the day.  Eliminate desktop printers, reduce the number of private offices, and create attractive stairways in place of elevators to induce walking.
• Have fewer meetings of shorter duration to reduce forced sitting down, since prolonged sitting is one of the least healthy activities in which we engage every day.
• Have more ergonomically friendly furniture and furnishings and LED lighting in all workspaces.

Even if employers do not particularly care about the per-employee cost of healthcare, under ObamaCare, the non-deductible 40% excise tax, sometimes called the “Cadillac tax.” is based on the per-employee cost, not the total healthcare cost budget.  That tax will hit all employers who fail to manage their per employee healthcare costs below $10,200 in 2018.

ObamaCare has many conceptual flaws, but if it forces employers who have the best ability to influence employee health and healthcare cost management, to tackle the problem, it will have at least that as a positive, if unintended, outcome.

As I have attempted to secure investors for our feature film From the Rough, I have gotten extremely frustrated by comments many people have made that our investment is much “riskier” than putting their money in publicly traded stocks and bonds, or even real estate construction.

An article entitled “Tim Cook vs. Steve Ballmer” written on April 23, 2013, by Zach Epstein, the Executive Editor of an online portal called BGR, points out that investors are calling for the ouster of Tim Cook, the Apple CEO, who has presided over a 40% decline in Apple’s stock since he succeeded Steve Jobs, just as they have called for the ouster of Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO who succeeded Bill Gates in 2000, while Microsoft stock has declined by 43%.

http://bgr.com/2013/04/23/tim-cook-vs-steve-ballmer-nyt-459167/

Epstein points out that Ballmer has increased Microsoft revenues by 221% since he took over and has increased profits by over 80% during that period.  Similarly, Apple’s revenues and profits have increased since Cook took over.  While it is always arguable that companies like Microsoft and Apple could be better served by other leaders, the argument that these CEOs are responsible for the poor performance of these Company’s stock is a poor rationale for replacing them. The reason for the poor performance of these companies’ shares may very well be unrelated to their performance as CEOs.

The price of public company stocks or bonds, or of any publicly traded asset is based primarily on how actual and prospective buyers and sellers collectively assess future expectations of how that asset will be valued.  The rationales for that collective assessment are unknowable.

When Microsoft and Apple reached their historic high prices from which they have declined, those who bought the shares and drove up the price had a set of expectations on share price appreciation or returns from dividends that they shared with no one.  Since no one buys a publicly traded asset expecting to lose money, or even to secure an economic return comparable to a U.S. Treasury debt instrument, the only conclusion we can draw is that they believed that the shares of the companies they acquired would produce a positive economic return far higher than those produced by a Treasury debt instrument.  However, we do not know what they expected in terms of future return, and we particularly do not know what kind of company performance they believed would result in that return.

In effect, when any of us buy shares of a publicly traded asset, we are betting that the collective expectations of those who have bought or held on to the asset are not unrealistically high.  However, we can never find out enough then or at any other time to know whether our bet was a reasonable one at the time we made it.  Those who bought Microsoft and Apple shares at their historic highs have essentially bet wrong up to this time.  Because the expectations of buyers and sellers have been disappointed, there have been more trades initiated by sellers taking profits or deciding that they had better use of their money than retaining shares in those companies.

I experienced this many times as Pitney Bowes’ CEO when I visited with investors and prospective investors.  When our stock price declined, especially in 1999 and 2000, they were less interested in learning about the inherent performance expectations of our company than about what we knew about the behaviors and intent of other investors.  They did not want to buy shares and see them decline because others had lower expectations about the company’s future than they did.

One of the reasons investment firms gather every scrap of intelligence about the intent of other investors is because that intent, if translated into future behavior, affects the stock price.  Similarly, large investors like Fidelity Investments deliberately disguise their purchasing and selling decisions to avoid having those decisions prematurely influence the behavior of other investors to raise the cost of buying shares or devalue shares they were trying to sell.

As a CEO, I never sold a share of Pitney Bowes stock, because I did not want my decision to sell stock, even to balance my overall investment portfolio, to influence the behavior of others.  I felt that my obligation to shareholders, particularly to employees who held shares, was to signal my confidence in the company’s future, not to send the opposite signal.  That decision cost me countless millions of dollars, probably in excess of $10 million over time, because when I was free to sell, the company’s stock price had dropped below $25 a share and has never gotten close to that point.  During my tenure, the stock reached a high of over $71 a share, and was frequently in the $40-50 per share range.  The collective market behavior was probably irrational in valuing the stock at $71, even during the optimistic times of the late 1990’s when the stock price hit that level on two occasions.

The main reason to buy shares in a publicly traded asset is the liquidity of the investment.  If an investor wants safety, publicly traded stocks, bonds, commodities or real estate trusts may be terrible choices, even if the underlying companies are very strong.   Stocks used to be a good choice when investors could count on the consistency of dividend payouts, but fewer companies than ever maintain or increase dividends over time, and the payout of dividends does not guarantee the maintenance of the company’s share price.  We need only look at my old company, Pitney Bowes, to see that a dividend that keeps increasing does not translate into a higher stock price.

Why is all this important?  It points out that the question of investment risk needs to be evaluated in a new light.  Our film project has certain risks, just as any intellectual property licensing project has risks, but the one risk it does not have is having a valuation that depends on the unknowable collective expectations of future investors.  The value of our film as an asset depends totally on its performance, not on future expectations of its performance.

There are circumstances in which the value of a film depends on future performance expectations, particularly those in which the distributor and owner of the asset is a major studio which can make a rational decision to choose to write off the asset and do nothing further with it, and to devote efforts to competing films.  This is not one of those circumstances.

I make no judgment as to how our film stacks up in attractiveness against other options people may have, but I know that the publicly traded asset has risks that are not present in our case, and are not able to be evaluated with any degree of accuracy.

In the healthcare marketplace, I am seeing an inexplicable contrast between companies that are able to attract over $200 million in investor capital because of wildly unrealistic expectations about future share price appreciation, and our company, which has steadily grown in an extremely adverse environment and has a relatively safe revenue stream.  I have long since stopped getting upset about trying to change collective irrationality.

However, I believe it is good for me to remind everyone who considers investments to remember that unknowable expectations make assets dependent on future market price movements inherently risky at a level that an asset dependent on the performance of a particular entity cannot match.

What makes it most remarkable is Cissy Houston’s ability to recall small, but important, moments in her own life, as well as the life she shared with Whitney Houston.  Relative to her own life, she shared several stories about how she would use a new technique in background singing to give a prominent artist’s song more life and richness.  She clearly took her craft very seriously, but, more importantly, she opened the minds of the artists she supported as to the potential for their musical performances they had not previously appreciated.

Her story about giving Whitney Houston almost no advance notice about her need to substitute for Cissy in a scheduled performance at a nightclub gave me the chills.  It reminded me of so many fictionalized stories in which the understudy gets an opportunity because of the unavailability of the star, except that, in this case, the star deliberately engineered the substitution to give her daughter the best chance to succeed.

I have come to appreciate the preciousness of those highly impactful small moments and small decisions.  We are shaped by both the big decisions all of us make and the small moments that have indelible effect on us.

These were some of the big decisions in my life, along with the decision to produce a feature film, and the big moments, but I wanted to share some of the most important small moments, events which look objectively unimportant, but which stuck with me years and even decades later.  These small moments are the ones that leaders like Coach Catana Starks create and reinforce, and, in many ways, they often become the foundation for the bigger decisions that people make about their lives.

As I think back on small moments, I think of a handful of events involving my parents, and one involving someone I barely knew. The small moments involving my parents occurred throughout our lives, but a few stand out:

• At Christmas, when I was seven years old, my mother handed me a gift, a biography of the American Presidents.  After I opened it, she told me that it was important for me to remember that I could be the President of the United States or achieve anything I wanted, if I were willing to pay the price.  That insight, that we determine what happens to us, has stayed with me.
• I attended a Christmas gathering at the home of one of my aunts, my sister’s godmother, who gave her more gifts than she gave me.  I acted childishly. Hours later, when I was in bed and my room was dark, my Dad came in and quietly explained why that had happened.  He talked about the special bond my aunt had as a godparent.  I learned that there is an optimal time and place to give anyone advice and counsel.  He created a teachable moment, but, more importantly, he taught me how to recognize when there are optimum teachable moments for others.
• When I was 10 years old, I watched my mother quietly, but firmly, get employees at the New York State Motor Vehicle Bureau to become more sensitive to the public they served by threatening to go to the media and to her elected representatives.  She was a role model for both how to get her way without raising her voice, and how to identify the vulnerabilities of other people to get what she wanted.
• When I was not given the valedictorian honor I deserved at the end of high school, my Dad quietly, but firmly, told me that I had “left too much to chance,” and that I should never let that happen on something that mattered.  That lesson stuck with me.
• When I was a poorly performing high school debater, an older student, who was a debate judge, told me that I was not very good, but could become good through training.  That brief conversation taught me that everyone can improve himself or herself with the right kind of structured help.  My younger son James had the same kind of inspired conversation with his chess coach Martin Nilsson, who convinced him that he could be great, and helped him realize that dream.

Sometimes we do not even know what effect we have had on people because we do not realize what connects with them.  I found out years after I became CEO that my predecessor George Harvey had begun to see me as a possible CEO candidate because of my command of the Legal Department technology on a 30-minute tour I provided him before a holiday party in 1989, five years before the decision was made to consider me for the CEO position.

Stories move us because they create small, teachable moments, as do small symbolic gestures.  I recall a conversation in early 2010 in which, at a dinner with Professor Jay Winsten of the Harvard School of Public Health, he stated that the catalytic event that accelerated the adoption of the designated driver concept was the inclusion of five seconds of content about designated drivers on every episode of the popular TV show Cheers.  Winsten told me that entertainment changes culture, more so than education, laws and regulations, business success, public service announcements, or broad publicity.  That lesson has stayed with me and kept me going on the film, despite the many obstacles I have encountered.

Great teachers, coaches, leaders, and mentors like Coach Catana Starks live in the world of small moments.  Contrary to the Hollywood portrayal of inspirational sports films, those small moments are not the motivational locker room speeches before or during an important game, but the encounters that happen well before that.  Every film depicts some of those small moments, but Hollywood often does not find the best ones.  The reason it does not is that it often looks for them in sports-related interactions that are tied to dramatic events, not the interactions far removed from the prime purpose of coaching assignments.

My favorite example of how a coach routinely changed the course of his athlete’s lives is John Wooden.  Although Hollywood films typically portray coaches giving a typical speech at the first day of practice about the athletic challenges their teams would face or about the coach’s requirements and rules, the part of the John Wooden orientation speech every UCLA basketball player routinely mentions in their recollections about him is the one about having clean, dry socks for every game and practice.  Wooden included that line in his speech for two reasons:

• The more tactical reason he gave was that teams have to be able to play an aggressively and run actively the entire game.  Sweaty socks lead to blisters, which inhibits performance at the end of games.
• The more strategic reason for his comments is the lesson about attending to small life habits and getting them right.

Coach Starks had her own John Wooden speech about the team giving her their golf shirts, so that she could launder them the way she had been taught by her grandmother, a commercial laundress.  The shirts would stay clean, bright, pressed, and sweat-free longer and help the team perform better.  In the film, we have a John Wooden book near her bed, but she was an expert practitioner of the use of small moments in her coaching and teaching.

People judge us by things that occur in the small moments, and often by things we do when we are not conscious of how our actions affect others.  Our deeply ingrained habits shape how others think of us more than our conscious actions.

Hollywood studio films often succeed, in spite of themselves, because their filmmakers get the small moments right and touch a responsive chord. It is very difficult to do so, because the tendency is to try to micromanage the responses of audiences around the big messages of a piece of entertainment.  However, what most matters are the iconic moments that accompany the smaller messages in an entertainment product.

Those filmmakers, entertainers, teachers, coaches, leaders and mentors, who figure out how to get the small moments, usually succeed.  Their work efforts tend to be timeless and valuable to many generations, and become the fodder for inspirational stories.

Our goal is to celebrate Coach Catana Starks, a person who clearly mastered the art of making small moments have big impact.

Type 1: the person who performs a single dramatic heroic act

When we talk about celebrating everyday heroes, we should pause to redefine what we mean.  When I was growing up, a hero was someone who did something “extraordinary” and positive for others or for the community at large.  We became accustomed to defining heroism in terms of saving someone’s life, such as a firefighter who entered a burning building to rescue someone or the police officer who saves a citizen’s life.

Type 2: the person who plays a vital role in a bigger heroic effort

More recently, we have expanded our definition of a “hero” to include those who provide a vital contribution to a major accomplishment, such as the work many unsung heroes played in winning World War II, as Paul Kennedy profiled in his great book Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War.  On Saturday, March 16, 2013, I attended a wonderful event for the Explorers’ Club, which celebrated both a few very famous people, like Senator John Glenn and Mercury Astronaut Scott Carpenter, and both of these kinds of heroes.

The Explorers Club celebrated a Sherpa who saved many people’s lives in mountain-climbing accidents in Mr. Everest, who would be like our first kind of hero. James Cameron, the director of Titanic, who did a number of deep oceanic exploration efforts, credited a number of engineers like a wonderful gentleman named Kevin Hardy from San Diego’s Scripps Oceanographic Institute with being essential to his success.  Hardy, with whom I spoke at dinner Friday evening, designed and built the unmanned capsule that descended to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean in the world, took photos and captured other data essential to preparing Cameron for his deep dive in 2012.

Type 3: The person whose cumulative body of work is heroic, but is insufficiently recognized or rewarded

However, there is a third kind of hero, which we do not explicitly celebrate, but should:  the person who consistently develops innovative solutions that make a big difference in the lives of those he or she touches every day.  Often, these innovative solutions are not documented, and, as a result, they are not celebrated in books, movies, plays, or even in recognition events like the Explorers Club event, although the Explorers Club comes closer than any organization I have seen to recognizing this kind of unsung hero.

Along these lines, I was pleased to read today that baseball will be honoring Dr. Frank Jobe at the July 27 Hall of Fame induction ceremony for his pioneering work in what is now called “Tommy John” surgery.  Dr. Jobe invented that surgery on the baseball pitcher, Tommy John, who had damaged his pitching elbow to the point that his chances of recovering and pitching again were estimated at 1 in 100.  His ligament grafting process, invented in 1974, increased the chance of full recovery to over 90% today. Dr. Jobe has contributed to the career successes of several dozen pitchers and position players and has probably been responsible for billions of dollars of enhanced value for baseball team owners, only a fraction of which has gone to him.  Although he is a wealthy man, he is a relatively unsung hero in baseball and other sports.

Coach Catana Starks: the ultimate example of the third type of everyday hero

However, to me, the everyday hero we should celebrate in entertainment, books, and recognition events is the person who innovates everyday in multiple situations, changes the lives of many other people, but does not get recognized publicly for much of what he or she does, and often is far more under-rewarded than Dr. Jobe.  That is why I have put the story of Dr. Catana Starks on screen, and why her story and others like it need to be told.

Our film could only scratch the surface of what Coach Starks was able to do over a lifetime of coaching.  Part of the reason was because she did her job in such a quiet way that it was difficult to dramatize some of her accomplishments within the time constraints of a full-length feature film.  Part of the reason was that she did not think to tell us what she had done because she did not appreciate how heroic it was.  Finally, the major part of the reason was that her heroism was not the single, easily definable accomplishment that could be the subject of a large project, but the cumulative effect of many smaller, innovative acts that made a big difference in the lives of those she touched.

What we would have liked to celebrate, but did not get a chance to celebrate, were many small acts of daily heroism about which we either learned from Coach Starks after we finished shooting the movie, or from others.  There are many stories about Coach Starks, and they fit into three categories:

• Redefining adversity as opportunity;
• Seeing opportunities to make a difference in situations that no one else saw; or
• Using scarce resources in novel ways.

Redefining adversity as opportunity

Coach Starks did not have the budget or the established, prestigious program to recruit the most sought-after golfers, so she often had to recruit people who were from less advantaged backgrounds.  Her genius or “heroism” was her innovative way of convincing them that their apparent “disadvantaged” backgrounds prepared them better for the competitive challenges of life than the so-called “advantages” bestowed on their competitors.

My favorite story about Coach Starks in this regard was how she figured out that the “disadvantages” of not having enough money to afford hotel rooms the night before a tournament and of not having a big enough van to enable everyone to have a sleeper seat could be turned into an opportunity.  In the beginning, the person who sat upright in front with her on a long overnight drive was disadvantaged, but she gave that person a special treat, in terms of hours of conversation in which she presented life lessons.  The golfers with whom I spoke told me that they eventually came to see the front seat position as a better option for them than a sleeper seat, even though they had a less comfortable sleeping position.  Every one of them remembered those long conversations years later.

Seeing opportunities where others did not

Coach Starks was a teacher.  Many teachers have invited inmates from local prisons to speak to students about the problems of drugs and how they lead to bad behavior.  Coach Starks did that as well.

However, she went one step further.  She had one drug dealer speak who had been sentenced to life imprisonment from three felony convictions during his teenage years.  It prompted her to use her accumulated knowhow on coaching and mentoring to persuade the prison system to give him an opportunity to get treatment and eventually be released.  She became an advocate for reducing the sentences of those whose drug-related offenses occurred early in their adult lives and who had reformed during their prison tenure.

Using scarce resources efficiently

Coach Starks did not have the high-priced instructors or technology to help her team refine its golfing skills.  She came up with two innovative solutions:

• She tapped volunteers in the Nashville area who gave her golfers free instruction at the driving range or on the public courses.  These volunteers became mentors beyond the help they gave players relative to their golfing skills.
• She used a video-cassette recorder to capture the golf strokes of her golfers and then urged them to send the video cassettes back to their coaches in their countries or communities of origin.  This accomplished two things:
  • It gave the golfers instruction from someone from whom they had learned to play golf and who was intimately familiar with their technique; and
  • It reinforced a lifelong support system they would need for not only golf, but also everything else they would do.

I could have used many other examples of her innovation solutions to problems caused by resource scarcity, but there are too many from which to choose.  Her decades long success as a coach and teacher is the result of many small innovations, no one of which is dramatic enough to be the foundation for a piece of feature film or documentary entertainment, but the cumulative effect of which was huge.

Her story deserves to be told, and it will be told in public venues, beginning later this year in From the Rough.

“At least three recent academic studies have demonstrated that the number of people who move for tax reasons is negligible, even among the wealthy.”

As a person who knows many wealthy people who have moved to states with no income or inheritance taxes, and many who have chosen not to do so, I am often asked by many people why we do not leave Connecticut and establish a primary residence in a state like Florida, where I could save millions of dollars in taxes over the rest of my life.  My view is that Stewart is only partially correct and partially wrong in his assertion that higher taxes do not drive people to change where they live.

The first key determinant of whether high taxes causes wealthy people to flee a jurisdiction is the distance between the high tax and low tax areas.  People have moved from New York to Connecticut, or from Massachusetts to New Hampshire, or Maryland to Virginia for a long time because these states are in close proximity to each other, and Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Virginia are lower-tax states than the states next to them. Moves to a nearby state that do not require an individual or family to find new service providers can, and will, be made to improve someone’s tax position.

Where Stewart is partially correct

Moving from Connecticut to Florida or completely outside the United States is a far bigger and more complex decision, because someone would have to recreate all of the high quality services he or she receives in the high tax area.  As an older adult, one consideration that factors into every decision for me is the quality of healthcare.  My parents lived in the Daytona Beach, Florida area after retirement, and the quality of healthcare there was much more uneven, not because of the quality of the doctors, but because of the imbalance between supply and demand.  I would only move to another locality if the quality and availability of healthcare were equal to, or better than, what I can get here. Closely related to healthcare quality is the availability of nursing home and long term care facilities, and other services for the very old population.  My parents found out that the part of Florida in which they lived was great for people who were 60 and 70 years old, but was not as easy to navigate for the 80 and 90 year olds.

Beyond healthcare, there are many other considerations.  We have superb housekeeping and executive assistant help here, which took us a long time to find and nurture.  That kind of talent is not easily found when first moving to a new community.  Similarly, finding construction, maintenance, yard, weaving and tailoring, and other trades people is not a simple task.

The location of family and friends is also a critical decision point.  People want to have a critical mass of others they know in a community before locating there.  Tax savings are a great inducement for people, but the value of connections and relationships are of even more value financially.

For all these reasons, Stewart is partially correct.

Where Stewart is wrong

Many very wealthy people already maintain many residences, and have full support systems and groups of friends in each community.  It is not difficult for them to reorganize their time and activity to change residences from one of their jurisdictions to another.  People who are already “snowbirds” and split their time between New York and Florida can easily become Florida residents.

However, the bigger issue for wealthy people is that they will pay close attention to what high taxes are doing to their property value and their quality of life. High taxes do not correspond with high quality government services.  In many cases, they derive from an American form of what is called “crony capitalism.”  This is a form of capitalism seen in many underdeveloped countries, in which governments over-regulate the lives of people and provide uneven services.  Those who get better services are individuals who make campaign contributions or in some other way provide favors to elected officials and regulators.

Many states, and, to an increasing extent, the federal government, practice “crony capitalism” today.  When President Obama talks about redistributing money from the rich to the middle class or the poor, my view is that what usually happens with high taxes is that they take money from many productive rich people and redistribute it to a smaller class of rich or upper middle class people who support the party in power.  Moreover, there are unionized government employees, as well as the elected officials, who take a “toll charge” on that redistribution process.

When “crony capitalism” becomes sufficiently pervasive, wealthy people leave a community because it affects their quality of life.  Connecticut’s traffic congestion is a direct result of the pervasive and pernicious effect of the “crony capitalism” practiced by Governor John Rowland and the labor unions whose loyalty he secured with an outrageous 20-year collective bargaining agreement that has four more years to run.  Every time I see a malfunctioning rail car, an overcrowded parking garage at the Stamford Transportation Center, an excessively congested highway, I am reminded of the way Governor Rowland used the state as a private preserve for his cronies.  Although he did not get wealthy in doing so, and his crimes were relatively petty, the damage he did was enormous and far outlasted his tenure in office.

The quality of life in a community depends on the combination of state and local services.  In Connecticut, most governmental services are delivered locally, which keeps many wealthy people from leaving.  The schools, public safety, building and zoning decisions, and the acquisition of many licenses is done locally.  That means that well-run cities like Greenwich, New Canaan, and Darien give their residents a very different experience with government services than poorer cities like Bridgeport and Hartford.  Although Bridgeport now has a very good mayor, Bill Finch, it was one of the corrupt cities in America for decades, and saw three straight mayors go to jail.

Beyond the hostile environment for business and wealth creation, Connecticut has found a way to disenfranchise wealthy people by banning political contributions from anyone who individually or, as an executive officer, does business with the state.  This prevents a sizable number of business executives from helping candidates more favorable to their views get elected.  It gives a huge advantage to labor unions, which are exempted from this law.

The factor that is most likely to drive people from a high tax area to a lower tax area is the feeling of being disenfranchised in affecting a governmental system that is getting progressively more corrupt.  This is not an economic issue, as much as it is an empowerment and quality of life issue.

Stewart simply does not understand the psychological effect of a “millionaire’s tax” or a wealth tax or a high marginal tax rate that is used to redistribute wealth and power to cronies of elected officials, especially if it is experienced at all levels of government.  That is the real story, not whether somebody can save a few million dollars on taxes.

I have always taken the position that government taxes and fees can be higher or lower, but that the key issue for citizens is whether they feel they are getting value for what they are paying.  Arrogant and poor quality government service, poorly functioning infrastructure, like badly maintained highways or railcars, will drive out citizens, even in a lower tax jurisdiction. Articles like Stewart’s ultimately miss the point.

“He personifies the virtues that Graham (Benjamin Graham) spelled out in his classic 1949 book “The Intelligent Investor,” from which this column takes its name.”

Later on in the story, Zweig tells us more about Kahn:

“Discipline has been a key for Mr. Kahn. He still works five days a week, slacking off only on the occasional Friday.”

In answer to a question about his remarkable longevity, Kahn responds:

“Millions of people die every year of something they could cure themselves: lack of wisdom and lack of ability to control their impulses.”

Irving Kahn appears to be an individual firmly grounded in the real world, and as active as a 107-year-old can possibly be. Zweig commented: “In some ways, Mr. Kahn says, these are the good old days.”  As an investor, he correctly notes that he has more tools than ever available to level the playing field between investors and those from whom they buy securities.  His goal is to know more about the stock he is buying than the investor who is trying to sell it to him. He is energized by his job and his daily life, and his physical faculties have declined relatively slowly.

Although I have had many role models in my life, certainly Mr. Kahn has to be added to them.  I believe that the key to health and longevity is a continuation of one’s passionate commitment to family and friends, causes, and work.  When someone completely “retires” from active living, he or she actually increases his or her psychic burden.

The other key to healthy longevity is to live every day with the appreciation of life that a productive very old person carries through the day.  When I have met such people, very little that bothers me would bother them, because they have had a few extra decades in which to put life into perspective.

How do they think differently from someone at my age or someone far younger than I am?

• They have been through enough up-and-down cycles in life to realize that neither success nor adversity is permanent.  Life has a mix of both every year for us.
• Just as those who have had near death experiences tend to worry less about just about every other problem, those who have relatively short life expectancies tend to consider daily problems to be of lesser consequence.
• They celebrate small successes every day.  At first glance, this would appear to be an acknowledgment that a person has failed to achieve more ambitious goals, but it actually increases the likelihood of more ambitious accomplishments.  Efficiently taking small, successful steps often gives an individual the ability to adapt to changed conditions and achieve success with fewer big failures.

Conversely, by encouraging older people to retire and disengage from active work, we inadvertently put them in a much more psychologically vulnerable position.  They lose the ability to see past the news headlines into the many good things that are happening.  They get fearful, when they should be celebrating the progress we are making on many fronts.

Why do I believe that to be the case?  Someone in the flow of the business, political, cultural, and community world has a much better understanding of reality than someone who gathers information from the mass media.  The TV media, in particular, is designed to report what it calls “news,” but what is typically a highly distorted and negative selection of the broader flow of events and trends.  Initially local news editors, but now national and global news editors as well, on all news stations select stories for broadcasting or printing based on the principle of “If it bleeds, let it lead.”

For this reason, although the world is less violent than it was two decades ago, and the absolute level of crime is the lowest it has been for decades, the sensational reporting of crimes gives the impression that violence is at an all-time high.

Recently, I met a highly accomplished journalist and author named Greg Behrman, who feels the same way I do.  We spend far too much time covering what’s wrong in the world, and not enough time spotlighting the things we are doing right, and that require considerable innovation in solving problems.  Think about this point for a minute in a number of contexts:

• As a country, we are seeing a significant increase in the percentage of people that are overweight or even obese.  We have a true public health crisis in slow motion.  That is no longer news.  We see it all around us, particularly in the Southeastern United States, and in the lower income parts of big cities.

However, I learned that New York City has actually stopped and even reversed the incidence of childhood obesity, but I did not learn it from the news media, but from a speech given by Dr. Tom Farley, the City’s Public Health Commissioner.  I am sure that the advisory board meeting at which Dr. Farley spoke was not the first time at which this news was made public, but it would be difficult to find this story in the popular media.

• We get the impression that we are a more violent world than ever before, but Joshua Goldstein recently published a book called Winning the War on War, which documents that the absolute level of armed conflict is declining over time.  Why do we not see these statistics dominating the airwaves?

• The U.S. has had great success in several public health campaigns over the last four decades in reducing the percentage of adults who use tobacco, the likelihood of automobile related fatalities, the likelihood of workplace-related accidents, and the incidence of alcohol abuse.  This is not broadly or frequently reported.

• Our air is cleaner, there is a lower incidence of acid rain, and the level of hazardous waste discharges in our factories is far lower than it was 40 years ago, but there is very little reporting on these positive environmental trends.

• In many respects, medical science has enabled us to achieve a better quality of life than was possible when I was growing up.  My wife was an early beneficiary of lasik surgery, which eliminated her need to wear contact lenses or glasses for everyday distance viewing (although she still wears reading glasses.)

Whenever I am down, I think of Irving Kahn, but more importantly, I think of the old Frank Sinatra song That’s Life, particularly one section of the lyrics:

I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king

I’ve been up and down and over and out and I know one thing

Each time I find myself flat on my face

I pick myself up and get back in the race

That’s Life, That’s Life

I tell you, I can’t deny it

I thought of quitting, baby but my heart just ain’t gonna buy it.”

We should take a moment upon reading this and celebrate Irving Kahn and everyone like me who keeps getting “back in the race.”  For, in doing so, he has clearly discovered the true fountain of youth.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/12/is-chaos-a-friend-of-the-nfl.html

The comment that caught my attention was about the “bounty” issue, that is, the practice of coaches or players paying other players for success in injuring opponents so badly that they had to be removed from games or, worse yet, unable to play in future games. The practice is bad enough in creating injury risks for individual players and is offensive on that basis alone.  Indeed, it becomes another source of the second problem, causing long-term injuries to players in order for a team to win a game or to secure a better position in an individual season.

However, Coll points out another risk of not aggressively trying to punish and prevent the practice:

“Yet if pay-to-hurt is as endemic as Vitt reportedly suggested, it may eventually lead to game-fixing schemes by professional gamblers. At least a quarter of a billion dollars is wagered weekly on N.F.L. regular-season games. Big dollars, weak refereeing, and corrupted locker rooms are a recipe for organized crime.”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/12/is-chaos-a-friend-of-the-nfl.html#ixzz2GLcPRHR5

This is the logical consequence of a system in which a great deal of money is made through gambling, as opposed to the money by the entertainment value of sports.  All sports police a number of practices to prevent gambling from altering the events on which the bets are placed.  Historically, gamblers have sought to alter results by causing players to withhold effort or to make mistakes that enabled the other team to win.

This was the case in the famous Black Sox scandal in 1919, in which eight Chicago White Sox players were accused of receiving money from gamblers to take steps to enable the Cincinnati Reds to win the 1919 World Series.  There was a basketball “point-shaving” scandal in the early 1950’s in which seven colleges, led by the national championship team from the City College of New York, accepted money from gamblers to reduce the point differentials between themselves and opponents to enable gamblers to win bets.

Similarly, there have been many cases in boxing in which boxers were suspected of “taking a dive,” that is, intentionally losing to enable gamblers to win bets placed on opponents.  The case in which the influence of gamblers was broadly suspected was the first round knockout of Sonny Liston by Muhammed Ali in 1965.  The punch that resulted in the knockout did not seem to be that powerful, and it happened at a point in the match at which Liston was relatively unscathed.

In thinking about the “bounty” issue, Coll makes the point that if the NFL does not crack down on bounties, the small rewards coaches give players or teammates give other teammates will be dwarfed by the bounties gamblers will provide to several players in a position to injure opponents.  Many intentional injuries would be penalized during the game, but if the financial reward is large enough, a player might be willing to accept the penalty, especially if his team is ahead and not in danger of losing the game as a result of the penalty.  What has to frighten the NFL is that there are superstar players who, if injured, can have a strong outcome on a game, such as a star quarterback like Peyton Manning or a star running back like Adrian Peterson of the Vikings.  These players are noteworthy because each suffered a season-ending injury in 2011, which severely damaged their respective teams’ seasons.

The “bounty” could have a much bigger impact if it results in a team being weakened relative to its opponents over future games as well.  There are certain kinds of injuries that may not take a player out of a game, but may make him less mobile, but still able to play.  These kinds of injuries are often not as well publicized, which gives the knowledgeable gambler an edge, particularly in a game that is otherwise expected to be close.

Think of last year’s Super Bowl, when Rob Gronowski, a star player for the New England Patriots, was well enough to play, but not at peak condition.  On the last drive, it is possible that, had he not been injured, New England might have scored the winning touchdown.  The game was that close.

Events like the Super Bowl are particularly susceptible to interference from gamblers.  The amounts of money wagered are exceptionally high.  The games are often close ones, in which a single injury during a game can make a big difference in the outcome.  The coach is likely to keep an injured player in the game, because there is no next game about which to worry.

There is far more at stake relative to the rules of professional football than simply the future health of players or the economic well-being of the teams on which they play.  The integrity of the game is at risk if the NFL does not figure out a way to reduce the overall level of violence.

The economic environment

This is a very difficult economic environment for people of all ages, but particularly for young people leaving college, graduate school, or professional schools, except for those with very specific trade-based skills in which demand exceeds supply or for men and women with science, technology, engineering and math degrees.

Our colleges and universities are run highly inefficiently and tuition, book, room and board costs are wildly inflated.  They burden our students with huge debt loads and force them into long term financial servitude with education that, in many cases, is of marginal value in terms of their earning power.

However, what makes the situation worse is that what we reward throughout traditional education, including college, is the mastery of a bodies of knowledge as defined by school boards and individual teachers and professors, not the skill to use that knowledge to solve problems and propose solutions.  Our young people coming out of school are generally clueless on how to navigate the worlds they enter, whether those are business, government, the educational sector, or the nonprofit sector.  Part of this navigation process is recognizing that knowledge gets obsolete fast, but adaptability and emotional intelligence skills need to continue to improve.

The most destructive aspect of our education system is that it teaches both conformity and the creation of regulatory and legal obstacles to engineer risks out of our lives, and, while it achieves destructive conformity, it can never succeed in getting rid of life’s inherent risks.

Young people who succeed are usually those who have parents that guide them more quickly to the practical lessons of what it takes to succeed, or those who understand that there is another body of practical knowledge that they need to grasp alongside the useless knowledge they secure in school.  The most resourceful young people succeed today faster than ever, and earn more money than ever because, paradoxically, although we have more well-educated people than ever from around the globe competing for jobs, there is a shortage of street smart people of all ages able to cope with the complex and fast-changing world in which we operate.

In short, there is more opportunity than ever for people of all ages, but only if they abandon much of the conventional wisdom that has constrained their ability to succeed.

Technological changes

The world in which we live provides more technology tools than ever that increase convenience and reduce costs and friction in our lives in big and small ways.  I am amazed at what I can do today that was not possible five years ago.  I cannot figure out where to begin in describing this new, wonderful world of technology.  For me, the biggest changes are:

• The e-books I can carry with me everywhere, including on my walks, with my Kindle and I-pad devices.  Being able to read anything anywhere is a big deal for me.
• Applications that help me as a driver, whether they are location services that guide me to addresses, gas stations, restaurants, and parking areas, or services that alert me to traffic congestion problems.  They amaze me.
• I love the ability to walk into an increasing number of retail outlets and to pay with a swiped credit card and to check out my own items.  I hate waiting in lines, and like self service generally.
• I love the number of places that have Wi-Fi services that enable me to get online in coffee shops, restaurants, airports supermarkets with seating areas, and public spaces.  My biggest pleasant surprise has been the increased penetration of W-Fi service on airplane flights.  These capabilities give me more time to do more.
• The ability to do web-based demonstrations and presentations to customers and investors has reduced the wear and tear of travel for me and my co-workers, and has given us more ability to reach people earlier in time than ever.

However, the negative aspects of our dependence on technology has also become clearer:

• We depend more than ever on recharging battery-power devices, and have to be on the lookout for electrical outlets in unlikely places.  I can always tell how recently an airport terminal or gate area was built or renovated by the number of electrical outlets it has.  I have had to buy a battery pack to carry around with me, and a converter from the direct current power my car generates to the alternating current power my computer will accept.
• Our dependency on electricity makes us more vulnerable than ever to power outages.  During Super Storm Sandy, the absence of electric power prevented people from withdrawing cash from ATM machines, from getting gasoline for their gas-powered back-up generators or their automobiles, from getting water from their electrically power wells in more rural parts of cities and towns, from using credit cards in retail stores, and from operating many basic technology tools that kept them connected to the outside world.
• There is an increasing gap, often generational, between those who comfortably use technology and understand its implications and those frightened by it.  The ways in which we describe and understand the world need to change, and many people are bewildered by the change.  For example, many older people in positions of power do not understand the value of a downloadable application, even if they are savvy about the value of information available online.  It is a big difference for someone to have a highly customized application to locate information, to be given alerts and notifications, and to be given the equivalence of online coaching, on the one hand, as opposed to merely making information available online.

The fragmentation of our society

Having highly customized information delivered to our fingertips is both a positive development, in terms of having us get more of what we want and need, and a negative one, in terms of having us experience a different world from our neighbors and friends.

The world in which we live increases our ability to have communities of interest across geographies, time zones, ages, organizations, and families.  It also increases our ability to be isolated from people different from us.  Not only do we not understand the points of view of people of a different political orientation or persuasion, but we are frightened by what we do not know about them because we do not talk to them.

The concept of “red” and “blue” states and “red” and “blue” Congressional districts in recent elections alerts us to the fact that we are an increasingly siloed society.  President Obama won the election because he did a far better job picking up the marginal voters in the states in which Democratic and Republican voters were of nearly equal proportions, and because he brought more of his supporters to the voting process than did Mitt Romney.

What President Obama proved was that successful political candidates of the future for high-level offices will need to build, maintain, and even grow permanent infrastructures for campaigning well before formal election campaigns begin.  The only candidates who can build an infrastructure within 18 months of an election are those with so much money, like Michael Bloomberg, that they can spend whatever it takes to build quickly.

We saw this in Connecticut.  A highly popular and well-respected elected official, Christopher Shays, who, in my opinion, had a far better chance of beating the Democratic candidate Chris Murphy and was a well-qualified candidate, waited too long and started too far behind Linda McMahon, who never dismantled her campaign apparatus from her unsuccessful 2010 U.S. Senate against Senator Richard Blumenthal.  She was a less attractive general election candidate, but the Republican Party perceived that she had the infrastructure and the money to run a campaign.  The fact that she was a weak candidate was less important than that she had unlimited money to run ads and build a get-out-the-vote system.

The most troubling aspect of where we find ourselves is that the elected officials who represent us are far less representative of the majority of us than they were in the past, because only the most ideologically inclined and single-mindedly motivated individuals can survive their party’s primaries.

I believe we will muddle through the next four years with a miserably dysfunctional federal government and state and local governments of varying quality.  Paradoxically, although both parties are focused on “helping” their core constituencies, their ideological rigidity will end up hurting the most vulnerable members of society, although in different ways.

Democrats who extend safety net benefits, such as health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, will find that they have ended up delivering poorer access to affordable healthcare than if they had simply done nothing.  Republicans, who are heavily driven by pro-life and religious values, will see more people drift away from them because of the harshness and insensitivity with which many members of their party discuss and manage big issues.

I do not worry about the future for my children, because they will find a way to take care of themselves.  I worry about the children of less advantaged families who will live in a world of increasingly diminished opportunity because of a dysfunctional government that cripples the ability of businesses and nonprofits to do their jobs.

As a citizen who believes strongly in public service, I will fight for the empowerment of all people, particularly in the healthcare, education, government services, and entertainment industry spaces.  I believe strongly that the battle for empowerment is winnable, but that those who care about other people cannot be spectators in the battle.  Everyone who cares will need to contribute his or her best efforts every day!

Oddly enough, we are more energized and happier at this time than ever before.  As I reflect on this strange feeling of happiness as a result of the adversity we have experienced, I think of a quote from Helen Keller:

“A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery, of hardships.”

Why are we happier after overcoming adversity than in avoiding adversity?  Black poetess Maya Angelou gives us one insight to the answer:

“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”

Her comment would suggest that the self-knowledge that we can overcome adversity, by itself, strengthens us.  Criss Jani, a black poet, philosopher and singer, expands on this point a little more when he says:

“I praise adversity, not to be pessimistic, but rather to strengthen myself. The more familiar that you are with it, the less likely you are to have a breakdown when it occurs. You become more reflective of its purpose, you understand God’s reason for it, and are then able to make the best of everything that you are handed. The darkness is only frightening after constant sunshine.”

He points out that fear of unknown adversity often is more draining that the actual encounter with that adversity.  Nicholas Nassim Taleb, in his new book Antifragile, almost likens it to receiving an immunization, which contains a weaker dose of the virus against which we are trying to protect ourselves in order to develop the immunity to the strong and actual virus.  We become much less fragile if we have experienced and overcome small adversities all our lives than if we had a completely adversity-free life.  In essence, intermittent adversity that we overcome strengthens us to deal with future adversity that, under normal circumstances, would be overwhelming.

The second reason confronting and overcoming adversity makes us happier is that it causes us to see the opportunity adverse situations present us.  Stephen Covey, in the first chapter of his best-selling book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, said that the essence of being proactive, the first of his seven habits, was to understand that it was not what happened to you that mattered, but you did in response to what happened.

What is it about our response to adversity that enables it to be converted into opportunity?  Criss Jani gives us one answer when he says:

“Disasters work like alarm clocks to the world, hence God allows them. They are shouting, ‘Wake up! Love! Pray!”

Adversity is like an alarm bell that tells us to think differently, and usually more expansively, about what we need to be doing.  This is the process that occurs when people conclude that they have “hit bottom,” and are ready to rise again.

We learn to be more humble and empathetic. We learn to celebrate what we have, rather than being unhappy about what we do not have.  We also learn that others have often suffered what we have suffered, and have found solutions that can be useful to us.

We also redefine adverse or mundane situations to identify the opportunities they present. When we moved back into our renovated house four Decembers ago, it was during the horrific Fall 2008 financial crisis.  My wife Joyce asked me to clean out our garage, since it was filled with furniture and other items we no longer needed, and we could not park our cars in the garage.

In cleaning out the garage, I discovered donation opportunities that I do not know existed:

• I gave away baseball equipment to the Darien Little League, but, more importantly, learned about entrepreneurs in Poland who could repair and reuse a torn 50-year-old baseball glove for which I had no apparent use.  From that experience, I learned about the unique opportunity to donate other used leather goods, like worn shoes, to an organization called Soles for Souls, which helped poor people in Latin America get shoes for the first time and save themselves from parasitic diseases that entered their body through bare feet.
• I gave away used tennis balls to the local nursing home to help them give more mobility to elderly residents using walkers, who could move more easily and safely with tennis ball on the four legs of the walker.
• I gave away used soccer balls and Frisbies to Any Soldiers, Inc., which helped our soldiers build goodwill in the villages of Iraq and Afghanistan, which probably saved many lives and improved the lives of village residents.
• I gave away old computers and printers to an individual who refurbished them and sent them to developing countries to improve their education systems.

The exercise taught me that I had very valuable assets that we were not using for maximum benefit.  It caused us to have our son James sell used books and other items in our basement, and to seek out similar unused assets in other people’s basements and attics.  He ended up helping the Boy Scouts and other charities extract several hundred dollars from sales of donated items through eBay, Amazon and Craigslist during his senior year of high school.

There are many examples of accidental opportunities discovered in the course of failing in pursuing another opportunity.  The most famous of these are the discovery of the Post-It note at 3M when a researcher was trying and failing a new adhesive formulation, and the discovery of Viagra as a treatment for erectile dysfunction when it failed as a treatment for angina.

Every situation, however adverse, presents opportunity.  Seve Ballesteros, about whom I wrote in a previous blog, practiced and eventually excelled in hitting from roughs, wooded areas, sand traps, and hills because he knew that hitting into these hazardous locations often gave him the best next shot to the hole.  He focused more on the shot after the one he was planning, and saw opportunity in targeting an adverse patch of ground to which to hit.

The Newtown tragedy, which occurred on December 14, 2012, brought no short-term good, because it was a senseless taking of many young lives, and it destroyed the wellbeing of so many families.  However, if, because of its horror, it results in a more in-depth look at the effect of guns in our country, some good will come of it.  I have heard arguments on both sides of this debate for decades, and it is one about which advocates feel very strongly.

I would only say that what has shocked me, in the aftermath of this tragedy, is the degree to which pro-gun legislators in Congress have eliminated funding for rigorous public health research to determine, through rigorous scientific studies, what would make the biggest difference in reducing the number and size of these mass killing incidents. http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleID=1487470&utm_source=Silverchair%20Information%20Systems&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=JAMA%3AOnlineFirst12%2F21%2F2012

What would most honor the memory of the victims of Newtown and other firearms related tragedies is to fund serious efforts to get the greatest minds together to figure out what is most likely to work, as opposed to listening to many people who have other agendas or who are advocating positions unsupported by evidence.  Too much legislation gets adopted hurriedly because people in elective positions feel a need to look like they are doing something, as opposed to taking a little more time, finding out what the evidence tells us, and doing something that truly will work.

The best gift we can give our children this Christmas is an optimistic frame of mind that gets them to see the positives in every negative situation or set of circumstances.  I am currently reading a wonderful book called The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor.  Achor describes the extensive research, which demonstrates that having a “happy” frame of mind, based on a combination of pleasure, engagement, and meaning, predicts and causes success, as opposed to being caused by success.

One of his funnier and sadder sets of observations is the experience he has had with Harvard students who should feel very happy, since they have reached a pinnacle of success as individuals whose college credential will give them a long-term benefit.  Instead, many of them get depressed because they see the many people around them who have equal or better academic achievements and think of themselves as failures.  They forgot that, as Harvard students, they are already in the top .1% of all students in the world in academic achievement and have bright futures because of that.

My parents reinforced a belief that I could be anything I wanted to be, if I were willing to pay the price.  That belief that nothing was beyond my reach was the best gift they could have given me, and it has benefited me long beyond their lifetimes.  It is a gift I am passing on to my children and, I hope someday, to their children.

To all who read this blog, please have a wonderful Christmas and please use this time to reflect on the wonderful things we all have, as opposed to what we do not have.  Our futures have the potential to be far better than our pasts, if we can make ourselves believe that, and act upon our beliefs!