The Strength of Women Leaders

I am working on a long blog about founding brothers but, in the meantime I wanted to share a thought with you on the book Sarah Palin. I am in the middle of reading it too. But, let me preface that with another inspirational moment watching a program about small loans in poor countries. This TV program talked about non-profit small banks giving loans of $20-$100 to women in poor countries who are trying to make a better life for their children. It seems that when woman get these loans there is a 90% or more return rate on that money. That is a phenomenal number and I was really impressed. One woman was sewing bags made out of juice boxes for purses, another raised chickens, one collected hair by giving children small toys if they would collect hair. Not only did these women make a better life for their children but, they ended up hiring other women even up to 70 women to help in their businesses. So not only are they helping the economy in their one family home they are helping build a community with other women and their families. I am so impressed with this micro-credit revolution. When I was watching it made total sense, what women does not want a better life for her children so she would do anything to pay the loans back and build their business so their children have a better chance. Now the interesting point they made was that when they tried to give micro-credit to men it does not work. The Men do not stick with the program and do not pay back the loans. They are not daily invested with their children but a little more removed. So they lack what the women have as motivation to succeed. They tend to be more concerned with themselves and spend the money on their interests and sometimes their family get a little of the money trickledown style. But, Women directly help their children not only live better but, they proved that the children's education improves more immediately than what they thought would happen. In one generation you can turn a family around from being poor to not being poor. What an enormous influence that can be on a whole community or a whole nation. When you think about it, being a mother is a decision to sacrifice your own wants and needs for another and it begins usually by sacrificing your body to house and build a whole separate being. That kind of sacrifice in micro credit has proven to be effective in women receiving loans and being productive in business. Now you may ask what does that have to do if anything with Sarah Palin. I say a whole lot. When you think of how men tend to think of themselves when it comes to money you can see a whole nation's future being spent by these selfish men who tend to not think of what's best for the children when they plunge the country farther and farther into debt. It is people like Sarah Palin who is a Momma Grizzly who can see what would benefit the children, the family and the community. What works for micro credit can work for politics in America. Bring on the mamma Grizzles in Washington I am behind them supporting them one hundred percent!

Legacy

One of the most interesting stories from Outliers the book, involves the Southeastern corner of Kentucky. Up in the Cumberland Plateau is a wild country where the city of Harland lies. It was founded in 1819 by 80 immigrants who had come from the northern regions of the British Isle. The two prominent founders were Howard and Turner. Their Grandsons played a game of poker and argued about cheating and one shot the other dead. It is interesting that one of the Turner boys that was shot and killed was William Turner (same name as Pirates of the Caribbean). He apparently came into the home howling in pain when his mother told him to stop that and die like a man like his brother did. He shut his mouth and died. Many more family feuds are recording along the Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky and West Virginia. This is what the book calls the Appalachian pattern. The book attributes this pattern to a plague Sociologists call a "culture of honor." It is a world that took root in the highlands and also area's like Sicily, or Basque regions. It is a culture of Herdsman whose livelihood is dependent upon them alone and a man's reputation is central to his livelihood and self worth. It also has to do with where the original inhabitants of the region came from the scotch-Irish. They were a people in a lawless land steeped in violence protecting their livelihood generally livestock. The south has a strange higher than the rest of the country murder rates generally where the people know each other and why the murder happened. They have less property and "stranger" crimes.

So in the 1990's the University of Michigan decided to conduct an experiment on the culture of honor. They insulted young men and then measured their anger response. The ones who were the angriest grew up on the south. They didn't necessarily even have British ancestors but grew up on the cultural legacy of the South. This is interesting because in my opinion it fits what I have learned about gifts and talents. We inherit many of our gifts and talents from our ancestors. I believe we also inherit our ancestors' weaknesses that if we can identify at an early age in life we can overcome these weaknesses and not pass them on to our children.

The book talks about ethnic legacies too where we get certain behavior from the culture we are from. He goes into a lot of detail about plane crashes especially ones from Korea. Korean air just about shut down because there were so many crashes compared to other airlines. They discovered that between the pilot and co-pilot there is a cultural barrier that is hard to transcend where the co-pilot does not feel they can assert themselves. The typical accident comes from minor difficulties and seemingly trivial malfunctions. The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors. The kinds of errors that occur involve lack of teamwork and communication.

Now I don't know what all of this has to do with outliers except that our culture and ethnic backgrounds can get in the way of success if we don't recognize them. I think the author was filling in his book so he could have enough information to sell it. Don't get me wrong it is interesting and entertaining but, a little off subject I think. So is the next part that talks about a specific school where children go to school for long hours every day. It mentions that school was started for something for kids to do in the winter when the harvest was over. Then from that came the thought that if we work our brains too hard it will cause mental disorder. But, this school proves all of that false. You can work your brain hard and excel.

One of the points of school that I thought the most interesting is that they took kids that were from poor income families to go to this special charter school and they do as well as all the others. They found out that the problem with the lower income families is that they don't get the stimulation from education in the summer that the other kids do. They spend their time just playing in their neighborhood whereas the other upper and middle income families take their children to the museums and make sure they read during the summer. When they put these children in summer school when the next year came they were right where all the other children were. They did not lose their knowledge over the summer. So that is a plug for doing year round school unless but, only for the lower income families.

One thing I didn't mention was the thought about china and rice patties that the book brought out in the last chapters. It is so interesting that growing rice is not an easy endeavor. Building the patties, keeping the water temperature right, weeding, and on and on. They have found that Chinese and other oriental counties that grow rice are better in math and they think it has something to do with rice patties. The Chinese have an amazing work ethic In the rice patties so maybe that is why.

So hard work and divine providence plus a good parenting style and success is inevitable-that is a good thing to know.

IQ matters only to a point

Terman, a young professor of psychology at Stanford university, decided to make the gifted his life's work. He sorted through records of 250000 elementary and high school students, and identified 1470 children who's IQs averaged over 140 and ranged as high as 200. This group came to be known as the "termites". He tracked them throughout their life like a mother hen. He said once that there is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ, except possibly his morals. The book Outliers describes that the relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of 120, having additional IQ points doesn't seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage. In fact the universities where people come from that have won the Nobel Prize where not any better than Notre Dame or the University of Illinois that's all. So success does not matter if you are really intelligent you just have to be smart enough like smart enough to get into college but not necessarily Harvard. Even if Harvard were one of your choices you would find more smart people at Harvard but, it would not necessarily translate into success. If Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same kinds of family backgrounds as the Termites, and dispensed with IQ a altogether he would have ended up with a group doing almost as many impressive things as his painstakingly selected group of geniuses.

The story of two geniuses is very interesting. One genius goes to college loses his scholarship because his mom failed to file the financial forms. Then his transmission on his car runs out and he can't get the college to change his classes so he drops out. Another genius who has helped on the nuclear bomb he was a genius too who went to Harvard and Cambridge. His tutor (who later won the Nobel Prize) forced him to attend to the minutiae of experimental physics, which he hated. He grew more and more emotionally unstable and took some chemicals from the laboratory and tried to poison his tutor. But, all the discipline he got from that was to be put on probation. This brings into mind that intelligence that allows you to talk your way out of murder or convince your professor to move you to the afternoon class is why at the psychologist Robert Sternberg call "practical Intelligence.". Practical Intelligence includes things like knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect. Ernie has high practical intelligence and that is what makes him so good with people.

Where do you get practical intelligence? Well that is where we get into parenting. Wealthy parents intervened on their children's behalf, middle class parents use concerted cultivation to foster and assess a child's talents, opinions and skills. Poor parents tend to follow a strategy of accomplishment of natural growth. The middle class child is exposed to a shifting set of experiences. They are expected to think for themselves, challenge adults, and work out their own solutions to problems. But, given support from their parents in these endeavors. It appears Concerted cultivation is the key factor in developing practical intelligence.

Terman put his termites into 3 different categories based on how successful they were. The A's of course were very successful, the B's satisfactory and the C's dropouts. Then he tried to find the reason why they were there. It turns out the A's came from families in the middle to upper class who had parents that used concerted cultivation with books in their homes. So to make it to success you have to have a family or community supporting you and helping you navigate the world IQ is not enough on its own.

Outliers-10000 hours

It is hard to describe what I have learned from this book. It starts out talking about birthdays of Hockey players in Canada. The birthdays of the best hockey players fall in the months of January February and March. This is because the cutoff is December and so the first 3 months the players are the oldest. They are the bigger players and more likely pick for travel leagues and get all that extra playing time and attention. This is the same for baseball, basketball, as well as academics.

Bill Joy that started Sun Microsystems and who wrote most of the stuff we use to access the internet started at the University of Michigan when he was sixteen. The college just purchased a new computer system and he was hooked. He programmed whenever he could. There was a study by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson in the early 1990's. They studied music students from the Academy of Music. The study found that if the student put roughly 10,000 hours of practice in they were master's level musicians. But, if they only put in 8000 hours then they were only good students. This repeats itself in other disciplines so according to Malcolm Gadwall there is no such thing as natural. So if I practices singing an hour a day then in 24 years I could be a master of singing. That is how Bill Joy did it he spent hours and hours programming until he was a master. Even Mozart's early works are only considered not outstanding and written down by his father.

This is good news, because anything we like to do we just have to be disciplined in our practice and we can master whatever it is after 10000 hours. I think I almost come close to that with cooking that is why for the first time in my life I am starting to cook without recipes and it is not bad, most of the time.

The interesting point the book makes about Bill Joy and others is that when he went to college he didn't know anything about computers and before that time a computer had a tedious punch card system that wasn't programming just more like proofreading. Bill Joy went to the University of Michigan just as they switched to a new time-sharing computer that allowed multiple tasks at once. He was looking to go into engineering or math and just stumbled upon the computer lab. This is where my concept of the situation is different than the book because of my belief in Divine Providence. I believe Bill Joy was guided to the computer room by the spirit and to that University. It was no coincidence like Malcolm says-no chance occurrence. He calls it opportunity presented itself and that is true but by the end of the book and the many examples he gives of this same opportunity occurring again and again I believe it is Divine Providence.

If the opportunity had presented to Bill Joy and he did not enjoy computers or he did not have a strong work ethic for the accumulation of the 10000 hours than we might not have had the internet today or maybe someone else would have seized the opportunity. Of course he went overboard and programmed about 8 hours a day. By the time he went to Berkeley he was doing it day and night. He and his colleges would have reoccurring nightmares of forgetting to go to class.

The Beatles-were made because they went to Hamburg to a night club and played eight hours a day for 270 nights that's over 1200 hours performing time. Most bands don't perform that much in their whole careers. So when they came to America they had so much practice already that they were good.

Bill Gates' father was a wealthy lawyer in Seattle and his mother a well-to-do banker. His parents sent him to lakeside private school. Midway through Gates' second year the school started a computer lab and spent a thousand dollars on a computer. Then the University of Washington chose lakeside, because one of the founders had a son there, to test out the company's software programs on the weekends in exchange for free programming time. When that went Bankrupt gates and his friends hung around the university until they latched on to another outfit called ISI which was working on payroll software. Then when he crashed the system after stealing passwords his friend found that there was free computer time from 3-6 in the morning at the medical center or physics department. By the time Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to start his own software company he had been programming nonstop for seven consecutive years which is way past 10,000 hours.

 

Tongue Tied

In-between books I have been pondering on some thoughts that have been helpful to me. One is that when we repent of sins and are forgiven we have a feeling of euphoria rightly so because most of the time unless there are consequences to our choices that are longer lasting it is as if the sin never occurred. However at that point of euphoria is when Satan rallies the forces and attacks. He whispers lying vanities to us about how great we are and how the way we feel must be because of something we are doing. Then if we fall prey and give into those lies we become pride and pride becomes the sin we must repent of. Instead when we feel a euphoria because of the blessings of God's forgiveness in our lives we need to associate that good feeling with his grace, love and kindness and fill our hearts with gratitude instead of pride for the two cannot reside at the same time. This is what Mosiah says in Mosiah 4:11 "11 And again I say unto you as I have said before, that as ye have come to the knowledge of the glory of God, or if ye have known of his goodness and have ^atasted of his love, and have received a ^bremission of your sins, which causeth such exceedingly great joy in your souls, even so I would that ye should remember, and always retain in remembrance, the greatness of God, and your own ^cnothingness, and his ^dgoodness and long-suffering towards you, unworthy creatures, and humble yourselves even in the depths of ^ehumility, ^fcalling on the name of the Lord daily, and standing ^gsteadfastly in the faith of that which is to come, which was spoken by the mouth of the angel."

Humility helps us to be grateful for the lords goodness, mercy and love. It is at this time when things are going well that we need to most remember that.

 

The Second thought I have had is about being tongue-tied. I have pondered on the lesson at church on Sunday about not being offended and not having contention. I have had these experiences that when I talk to people a lot I will go home and analyze what I have said. Have you ever done that? I realize then that maybe I shouldn't have said this or maybe I shouldn't say that like that. And it is only much later when the full realization hits that maybe I have offended someone by a misunderstanding in what I have said. Then it dawned on me that I need to tie my tongue and enlarge my ears. Sunday at church I couldn't sing because I had a scratchy throat. So I was forced to sit and listen to everyone else sing. I really enjoyed listening to my husband sing he is really good. It was an eye opening experience for me to listen to others instead of just thinking about myself.

When I was a yoga I thought about this and decided that sometimes unwittingly are a tool for the adversary because we say too much. We may say one thing but because of the communication having to travel from mouth to ear and because we all start at different reference points than each other we may both have different meanings come out. Because of this we can innocently cause contention by offending others with what we think is innocent conversation. See Satan uses anything he can to stir the hearts of men to be angry with each other. Unless we are on our guard and tie our tongues and enlarge our ears we could be a stumbling block to others. I have devised a way to practice tying my tongue. Now all I have to do is teach this to my daughter.

The last of Benjamin Franklin’s advice

    I left off where Ben was talking about becoming a better person by degrees. He says those who wished to be happy in this world it was in their interest to be virtuous. He says the most important qualities in a young person are Probity (exact moral correctness) and Integrity.

Humility was one of the last qualities he added and he says the most difficult. To attempt at it he made a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others and all positive assertions of his own. This one rule would be an enormous challenge for me since all who know me know I have many positive opinions. One of the laws of his Junto to forbid the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion. He left out certainty in his opinions and forbade contradicting others directly. He describes this as the modest way in which his opinions where to be presented. He attributes this habit to his the weight he had with his fellow citizens. As you read on you see where he was the person everyone deferred to when they had an important question or proposed change.

One interesting idea he had was for young men to form a virtuous party and he thought it should be called the society of the free and easy. Free from the dominion of vice, (using the 13 weeks model to develop virtuous character traits), and free from debt. He continues with "One man of tolerable abilities may work great changes and accomplish great affairs among mankind if he first forms a good plan, and cutting off all amusements or other employments that would divert his attention, makes the execution of that same plan his sole study and business. These ideas were published in the "Poor Richard's Almanac" which sold so many copies he made considerable profit. I think this is similar to Glenn Beck's 912 project based on 12 principles and 9 values. I think it is a great idea to hold our public officio accountable to something other than negative advertising. Benjamin Franklin used his newspaper to teach values that he first tried out in his Junto (club for mutual improvement). One of them is that a vicious man could not properly be called a man of sense. He doesn't go into detail because I guess the article was in his paper but, basically the gist is that a vicious man lacks self control or what Ben calls the habitude of virtue.

The rest of the book talks a lot about his different offices and ways that he helped people. He had glass blower come in. He invented a better stove and street lamp. He helped with the war against the French and was commander of an army for a time. He found out that men are happy when working and quarrelsome when not. He prevents the hostile acquiring of wagons and instead helped pay for the use of the wagons. He predicted a disaster in one battle and tried to warn the general but to no avail and the disaster happened.

Benjamin Franklin was a man of common sense and he worked hard at becoming a better man by aspiring to virtue and education. His later life was instrumental in helping others be more educated and informed as well as providing financial support and advice to great ideas and improvements. If we were all a little more like Benjamin Franklin the world would be a better place. I am disgusted by the propaganda out in this world that focuses only on his faults. It is true that all men have faults and Benjamin Franklin admitted to his but, he tried to be better and do good in the world. Just think if we followed his advice or Glenn Becks advice and every 40 days try to improve something about ourselves. We would live in a better world were solving our problems would be easier. I am going to attempt to follow his advice and adopt a more humble form of communication and not directly contradict someone. How about You?

 

 

 

The acquisition of Virtue

Benjamin Franklin developed a system of acquiring virtue. He started trying to just do everything right and not making mistakes but, he noticed when he worked on one virtue thru habit he would forget another. He developed a system of checking virtues in a notebook when he made mistakes and he would try to get one virtue right a week and then work on the next. A well thought out system of making him a better person every day. The one virtue I need to work on that he records is silence. He states " …my desire being to gain knowledge…and considering that in conversation it was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue …I gave silence second place. Probity and Integrity he gave priority over all other virtues and I had to look up probity, it is absolute moral correctness. In obtaining these he states that he "…forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiment of others and all positive assertion of my own. He even forbade himself from using any words or expressions that imported a fixed opinion. He would not say words like certainly or undoubtedly but used others like I conceive, or I comprehend or I imagine. Even if someone was saying something that he thought was in error he denied himself the pleasure of contradicting them abruptly but would say that in certain circumstances maybe they were right but, there appeared or it seemed to be….He finds more success and less contradiction but a better reception of this modest way of communicating. Boy, what a world of difference this would make with my personality If I could learn this manner of communicating.

He states that the one virtue that is more difficult than all others is pride for he says "disguise it, struggle with it, stifle it, and mortify it, as much as one pleases it is still alive and will every now and then peep out and show itself."

I wonder at the desire and discipline that Benjamin Franklin had to attack his faults and one at a time build virtues. He was almost a little obsessed about it. But, then he realizes that it is impossible to be perfect but the striving to be perfect makes us a little better every day. He does not follow this all of his life but, it slowly tampers out with time because he is so busy but, he always carried his book of virtues with him.

What a different time that must have been people were were more cognizant of their shortcoming and how they could be better or maybe it was just Benjamin Franklin. But, I think it was a different time. Nowadays people are more interested in discussing how it is not their fault and how they are not responsible. Responsibility is a slippery string we may try to slide off it but it is always there between our fingers whether or not we acknowledge it. We are responsible for our actions for our words and emotions. When we say we are not we are lying to ourselves and the stumbling block is left in front of us. By acknowledging our actions and the consequences of them we are in a position to change with the freedom and ability to act for ourselves to make things different.

Benjamin Franklin decided to acknowledge he was responsible for how he spoke or acted and made strides every day to be better. How much difference he did make because of this decision and his strides to acquire virture.