Why I Didn’t Pay for My Most Important Lesson in College

Did you learn a lot when you were in college? I know I did. But the most important lesson I learned when I was in college wasn’t during a classroom experience. It didn’t happen while I was doing research in the library. It wasn’t even a boozy revelation during a game of beer pong. It was a far more basic moment than any of those.

I was crossing a street with two blind curves. Most of the drivers were my age, which meant they weren’t really thinking about pedestrian safety. I don’t remember exactly why I felt I needed to cross at that spot, but I’m sure it wasn’t necessary. So, I looked both ways, hoped I wasn’t doing something stupid, and ran.

Obviously, I lived to write about it. Nothing happened. Well, nothing bad happened. But at that moment, I realized that I was the only person holding myself back from accomplishing the things I wanted to accomplish.

I might have remembered something and needed to change direction. I might have seen a pretty girl who I briefly chatted with and privately mused about what might have been if I’d ever asked her out. It’s all fuzzy now. What mattered is that, at that very moment, I realized what the biggest obstacle to my success in life was: me.

That was the lesson: I’m the one getting in my way.

Speaking as a middle-aged guy with young children, I know now that the lesson I learned is not the one I’d get today if I were standing at that same spot. Today, I’d encourage my daughter to find a safer spot.

But playing it safe can be an obstacle too.

I still strive to overcome myself. Sometimes I succeed, like when I decided to create Elephant’s Bookshelf Press. I was already deep into the process of creating Spring Fevers, the first anthology from EBP. I had created the Elephant’s Bookshelf blog years before ever thinking about creating a publishing company. From there, it was an easy step to naming Elephant’s Bookshelf Press. Soon after, I was applying for an LLC. It seemed like a no-brainer.

But there are still lots of moments where I discover the speed bumps that my intellect constructs, and I suspect the same is true for you. How do you overcome your fears and your own nay-saying? Are you filled with self-doubt? Most writers I know still would admit to harboring that bugaboo.

Here’s what works for me:

Read and write voraciously. I’m lucky to work as a journalist, so I’m paid to read and write every day. But I also read as much as I can. And as widely as I can. This helps me to:

Think elastically. A creative mind is one that can stretch an old idea into something new or connect seemingly disparate concepts into something that feels altogether different. It may be the most important element of:

Innovation. Take what has worked in the past and break it down into its vital elephants… er, elements. Can any of those pieces be upgraded? If so, what happens?

Ask questions. Do you know how your favorite author got started? …

“Write” every day: Though I physically write at least five or six days a week, I keep a loose definition of writing here. To me, writing includes imagining. Many of my best ideas come when I’m not able to jot them down or expand on them. I often come up with ideas while watching my daughters in their swimming lessons. Perhaps I should, but I don’t take notebooks with me to the pool. But I love musing on where some characters or settings might go, even if it’s just 15-20 minutes to mentally play that day. Write every day and you’ll see your writing flourish.

Plan and schedule. I used to write on the fly and see where a story took me. I read an article by an author who broke down her routine on her blog and later built a book on how she turned her writing routine into a 10,000 word a day habit. The key was starting with a light outline of what she wanted to accomplish that day. It helped her organize her thoughts and focus her mind. I’ve tried to apply that not only to my personal writing but also the day of writing and editing in my day job. In many ways, I still write by my pants, but I know when I’m going to write now and have goals for words or tasks. Which leads to the next item …

Create – and stick to – deadlines: I apply deadlines to all goals: daily goals, weekly goals, monthly goals, quarterly goals, and annual goals. When I know I have a busy Saturday ahead with family stuff, I usually list all the things I need to accomplish and scratch them off when they’re done. Sometimes I even write down things I’ve already done before starting the list – run 3 miles, feed the cats – to mess with my own mind and convince myself I’m getting things done. Sometimes it also helps my wife know where I am and what I’m hoping to do; she’s been known to add to the list, too.

Establish some sort of accountability system. This is the tough one for me. The truth is, keeping accountable is very difficult for a lot of writers. It’s too easy to say, “Oh, I just don’t feel it today. I’ll write twice as long tomorrow.” Or to be distracted by any of the myriad legitimate interruptions that occur from day to day. Sick kid? Sick parent? Got to take the car to the shop? Any of these things can ruin a day or drag on to several. Having a good friend or a touchy acquaintance whose job is to harass you when you’re trying to blow off your writing time is a good idea in theory, but I’ve learned that it doesn’t work every time.

Reward yourself for your accomplishments. In contrast to the accountability issue, this can be too easy sometimes. It’s important to recognize your accomplishments, but celebrate worthy goals and with supportive techniques. You obviously don’t want to say, “if I finish 100 words today, I’ll celebrate by not writing at all tomorrow.” It’s not only too few words and likely to have accomplished little, but you’d be taking a step back by not writing the next day. But if your goal was 50,000 words for a month and you reached your goal, take your significant other out to dinner, or for some ice cream, or something else pleasant and festive. You deserve it.

Of course, you may have different issues that get in your way of your writing. I can only imagine. But maybe you have found ways to overcome them too. I’d love to hear from you. Please share!

Idle Thoughts While Waiting for the AC to Kick Into Gear

The best laid plans of mice and men... I never had much interest in what mice were thinking, much less what they planned to do. Perhaps that's one reason we have cats. But that's the phrase that came to me from some back nook of my noggin.

There are so many things that cross one's mind when plans don't work out quite as expected. For example, I arrived home today — easily the hottest day of the year, topping 90 degrees not a dozen days after it was in the mid 40s — to discover that the air conditioning wasn't working. It's built into the same system that powers the furnace that went out last winter and which might be older than me.

Apparently, in addition to my oh so necessary jobs of mowing the lawn, cleaning the gutters, buying diapers, and finding some time to play with the cutest, most loving and loveable girls in the world, I also need to figure out how to deal with a system that's giving up the ghost right before its season debut. And still we write.

It seems that nothing will ever be easy, not even three-day weekends. I realize this sounds whiny. It is whiny. But so it goes.

As writers, it's easy to become despondent. We struggle to gain a foothold in the world, to get some sort of acknowledgement that our work is valued by readers. Heck, I cherish a rejection letter I received some twenty years ago that called the characters in one of my short stories "wispy" because it at least acknowledged that there was an interesting story; it just needed more work.

So that's what we do. We plug away, we edit, we read, we write and rewrite and rewrite some more until we're so sick of these characters that we consider creating a new storyline in which some crazed individual hires a hitman to whack the characters from the other story. Or maybe that's just me; I am from Jersey, after all.

Yes, it pays the bills, but it also keeps us sane — or it's our obsessive-compulsive means to keep the world in order and scare away the monsters. For me, it's the best way to know that I'm alive and making a minor mark in the world.

How about you? How important is writing in your life?

The Foundation, by Joel Fleishman

This review, which I wrote, was originally published at another site. If you want the link to the original, please leave a comment below and I will contact you directly.

Few books on philanthropy merit the accolade "instant classic," but The Foundation by Joel Fleishman has all the ingredients to be considered just that — especially by those whose work and lives are directly affected by foundations. And as Fleishman, a professor of law and public policy at Duke University, makes clear, that means most of us.

Indeed, readers unfamiliar with the many roles foundations play in society will quickly learn how versatile foundations can be, whether driving a brand-new initiative, partnering with others, or serving as a catalyst by scattering seed funding among promising projects in the hope that one or two will take root and produce lasting change.

Throughout the early chapters of the book, Fleishman explores themes of effectiveness and efficiency. To be effective and efficient, he writes, foundations need to employ decision-making processes and progress-checking systems that increase the impact of their funding. To be strategic in deploying their resources, they should focus on problems that are ripe for solution while retaining flexibility in how they respond to unexpected opportunities. But regardless of where a foundation decides to focus its efforts, success should always be the goal. And to be successful, an initiative should provide major benefits to the public, expand knowledge in a particular area or field, catalyze social change, take an initiative to scale, and/or help a grantee find a new path to greater effectiveness.

Unfortunately, Fleishman argues, many foundations behave as if they don't care about success — behavior, he notes, that is at cross purposes with the social-benefit mission used to justify foundations' existence as tax-exempt entities in the first place. He bases his observation on the reluctance of many foundations to share information about how they decide which goals to shoot for and the strategies they use to achieve them, as well as on the lack of public — and, often, private — analyses of those initiatives, whether successful or not. "Those foundations that are truly interested in using their resources in ways that will have the greatest positive impact on the world around them," says Fleishman, "should study the stories of the most successful and effective foundation initiatives. They provide models for the future success stories that others in the foundation world should aspire to write."

To buttress his argument, the middle section of The Foundation offers a dozen case studies of high-impact initiatives — selected from the one hundred prepared for a companion volume that is available, free of charge, from the Duke University Web site.

Calling attention to the talented leaders who shepherded initiatives through to completion and to the fortuitous match between the nature of the problem to be tackled and the judgment, experience, and discipline of the individuals who took on those tasks, Fleishman and his graduate students present a dozen synopses of foundation successes, starting with the 1906 Flexner report funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which led to significant reform of medical education in the United States, and continuing with an initiative from nearly every decade of the twentieth century, including Julius Rosenwald's efforts to build schools for rural African Americans in the 1920s; Gunnar Myrdal's seminal, Carnegie-funded study of race in America in the 1930s; the Rockefeller Foundation's support for the work of Dr. Norman Borlaug and his Green Revolution colleagues in the 1960s; and George Soros and the Open Society Institute's support for democratization and civil society in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1980s.

However, it is his assessment of foundation failures — and some are, by Fleishman's own admission, a matter of opinion — that sets The Foundation apart from many earlier books on the subject. Critics of foundations might argue he doesn't go far enough, but Fleishman does not shy away from drawing attention to foundations' shortcomings, confident in his belief that a fair, unbiased examination of foundations will demonstrate that they have indeed provided significant social benefit to Americans. "At the same time," he writes, "I am convinced that the foundation sector as a whole, as great as its social contribution is now and has been for most of its history, seriously underperforms its potential." The challenge, he adds, is "to ensure that foundations can raise the level of their performance by reducing their insulation from beneficial external influences while retaining the independence they need."

One of the ingredients of publishing success is timing, and Fleishman's has been impeccable. While he was conducting the interviews for the book in 2003 and 2004, Warren Buffett was beginning to think about giving a significant portion of his vast fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, already the world's largest. Of course, that gift, when announced in the summer of 2006 — along with the blizzard of media attention that followed in its wake — helped build an audience for the book beyond what Fleishman and his publisher could have expected when he began the project.

The result does not disappoint. The Foundation is sweeping in its scope, balanced in its presentation, and deeply informed by a lifetime of study and observation. Readers who only recently have become interested in the subject of philanthropy are likely to be surprised by what foundations have accomplished in the century or so since Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller created the template for the modern foundation, while more seasoned practitioners will be pleased to see foundations accorded the respect and serious treatment they deserve.