“I do not understand; I pause; I examine”

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) has been recognized as one of the most significant philosophers of the 16th century. Born into a privileged family and raised during the period of the French Renaissance, he was educated in a private boarding school where all his lessons were taught in Latin. Because of his family’s great wealth, he was free to devote the first half of his life to jobs serving the public sector; including volunteering as a legal counselor, advisor to King Charles IX and mayor of the town of Bordeaux.

In 1571, at the age of 38, he retired from public life to his estate, where he isolated himself from all social and family affairs so that he could dedicate his time to reading, meditating, and writing. It was in his castle’s round library room – which contained more than 1,500 books – where Montaigne probed his mind and produced two highly influential books titled simply Essays; which he published in 1580. Montaigne wrote that “I am myself the matter of my book“, and his stated goal was to describe humans, and especially himself, with utter frankness.

Some of the key topics Montaigne explored in his various essays include:

• Mankind’s dangerously inflated claims to knowledge and certainty
• The assertion that there is no greater achievement than the ability to accept one’s limitations
• The problem of trying to locate truth in commonly accepted ideas that are false or unexamined – especially since many things we held yesterday as articles of faith today we know as fables.
• The importance of freeing ourselves from outside influences, customs and opinions
• His belief that the best path to understanding truth is by a careful exploration of one’s own body-and-mind.

Montaigne believed that the self, even with all its imperfections, was the best possible place to begin the search for truth, even though our identities can’t be defined as a stable thing because it is always changing. The most obvious example to him was the struggle of living with the infirmities of a human body. “Our bodies smell, ache, sag, pulse, throb and age regardless of the best desires of our mind“. It is only in acceptance of these traits that we can remain faithful to the truth of one’s being.

Montaigne isolated himself while writing his Essays but maintained the importance of maintaining contact with the outside world of other people and events because one can learn much that is useful from others. He described human beings as having a front room, facing the exterior street, where they meet and interact with others, but also with a back room where they are able to retreat back into their interior private self to reflect upon the vagaries of human experience and consider how it impacts their intimate identity.

Montaigne was refreshingly different from other philosophers and academics of his day who believed that their advanced powers of reason were a divine gift that gave them mastery over the world and a happiness that was denied to lesser educated creatures. He mocked those philosophers who were proud of their big brains and his writings come across as wise and intelligent – but also as modest and eager to debunk the pretensions of learning.

He wrote of his fellow academics and philosophers: “On our highest thrones in the world we are seated, still, on our arses” and, “…in practice, thousands of little women in their villages have lived more gentle, more equable and more constant lives than us.

He mocked books that were difficult to read. He found Plato boring and just wanted to have fun with books. “I’m not prepared to bash my brains out for anything, not even for learning’s sake – however precious it may be. If one book tires me, I just take up another“.

[note: I must admit that this sentiment makes me feel somewhat better about my decision to hold off reading the notorious difficult novel Ulysses by Irish writer James Joyce].

Montaigne was honest about the limitations and usefulness of his own intellect and attacked his prestigious academic friends for studying difficult things that were not useful to our lives.

“Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies. Intellectuals would prefer you to study other people’s books way before we study our own minds. If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life”

I can’t help but wonder if Montaigne’s admiration for the working class – and life’s simple things – stemmed from the decision his humanist father made to leave him for three years when he was a small boy in the sole care of a peasant family in their town, in order to “draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help“.

Whatever the reason for his modest and humble personality, Montaigne comes across as one of the world’s first examples of a tolerant mind; a breath of fresh air in the cloistered and snobbish corridors of 16th century academia. He became an inspiration and encouragement to all those who felt put-upon and patronized by the arrogance of self-proclaimed clever people.

Montaigne tells us that each one of us is richer than we think. We may all arrive at wise ideas if we cease to think of ourselves as unsuited to the task just because we haven’t been classically trained or happen to lead an ordinary life.

The inscription Montagne had placed on the crown of the book shelf in his library was “I do not understand; I pause; I examine“. He had the inscription placed there to remind him of the limitations of his own knowledge and to caution him about the dangers that can result when one hastily forms opinions without careful consideration of all the facts.

Too many people today, especially since the advent of social media – which allows anybody to pass themselves off as experts – form their beliefs by adopting commonly accepted ideas or by making broad generalizations. Outside influences and political talking points trigger knee-jerk reactions from those who fail to take the time to study all sides of a topic – or to consider what is the truth and what is morally just.

It would be refreshing if more of us today, before forming our opinions, would like Montaigne, acknowledge the limitations of our knowledge, admit that we don’t fully understand a topic and then take time to examine all aspects of the issues in question using qualified experts in the field as our guides.

The danger of operating a society with uninformed or half-informed subjects was identified as early as the 2nd century by the Roman writer Publilius Syrus who said that it is “Better to be ignorant of a matter than to half know it“.

Today there are so many competing sources of information, where anyone with a computer can offer their uninformed opinions. Few people check the credentials of writers or the authenticity of the facts, and foreign actors can easily spread misinformation along via unregulated social networks.

The next time we are asked to form an opinion or make a decision about subjects we do not fully understand, we would do well to follow the sage advice of Montaigne: Do not let somebody else speak for you and do not fall prey to the pressures of biased outside influences. Instead take a moment to pause, study all sides of the issue, consult qualified experts and sources, and endeavor to reach true understanding.

If you can summon the conviction and discipline to do this, then you will be able to take solace knowing that even though you can not govern external events, you at least govern yourself.

R.I.P. RBG

Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away on September 18, 2020. Over the course of her 87 years the noted feminist and surprisingly unlikely popular cultural icon smashed glass ceilings and delivered plenty of wisdom—both inside and outside the courtroom.

On Bader-Ginsburg’s passing, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, issued this statement lauding her service to the nation and her important contributions to the country’s laws:

“Our nation has lost a jurist of historic stature and we at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her — a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”

Chief Justice John Roberts

Her life was filled with notable accomplishments which included graduating with the highest honors from Cornell University in 1954 and from Harvard and Colombia Law Schools at the top of her class.

She slowly worked her way up through the male-dominated law profession beginning with a clerking job in the United States District Court of Appeals in New York, followed by teaching jobs at Rutgers University School of Law and Columbia Law School – where she became the school’s first tenured female professor.

Her teaching and litigation in the 70’s on behalf of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, drew national attention when the legal briefs she wrote led the Supreme Court to strike down laws that favored men over women.

When she was appointed to the United States Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993, she was only the second woman to sit on the bench in the court’s 212 year history. RBG quickly became known for her scholarly, balanced opinions and her forthright personal courage.

But it wasn’t all those legal accomplishments that made RBG so loved – it was her laser-focused attention to be a champion for all those who suffered from injustice and inequality.

She had the Old Testament words “Justice, justice, thou shalt pursue” prominently displayed on the wall of her chamber and it epitomized the mission she pursued throughout her career – to eliminate gender-based stereotyping in legislation and regulations.

Blessed are the peacemakers and RBG should be counted among them because justice and peace have always been inextricably linked. It was Dwight Eisenhower who remarked that “peace and justice are two sides of the same coin“; Martin Luther King who preached that “true peace cannot exist without justice“; and Pope Paul the 6th who advised his flock “If you want peace, work for Justice“.

RBG focused on removing injustice in all its forms and her work helped to codify the important gains won by the women’s and civil rights movements into the nation’s laws; thus bringing a measure of peace to millions of American citizens who had suffered under laws that were not fair.

A child in a Supergirl costume pays respects to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg – Image courtesy of Reuters

One of the best ways to appreciate RBG is to examine her own words of wisdom about the topics that were near and dear to her:

ON HER MOTHER

“My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady, and the other was to be independent. The study of law was unusual for women of my generation. For most girls growing up in the ’40s, the most important degree was not your B.A., but your M.R.S... My mother made reading a delight and counseled me constantly to be able to fend for myself, whatever fortune might have in store for me.“

ON HER HUSBAND

“I had a life partner who thought my work was as important as his, and I think that made all the difference for me.”

ON TURNING REJECTION INTO OPPORTUNITY

“You think about what would have happened… Suppose I had gotten a job as a permanent associate. Probably I would have climbed up the ladder and today I would be a retired partner. So often in life, things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be great good fortune.”

ON FEMALE SUPREME COURT JUSTICES

“When I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the supreme court]? I say ‘When there are nine.’ People are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.“

ON WRITING DISSENTING OPINIONS

“Dissents speak to a future age. It’s not simply to say, ‘my colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way,’ but the greatest dissents do become court opinions... [you have to} fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.“

ON CRITICISM AND NOT GETTING A MAJORITY VOTE

“I’m dejected, but only momentarily, when I can’t get the fifth vote for something I think is very important. But then you go on to the next challenge and you give it your all. You know that these important issues are not going to go away. They are going to come back again and again. There’ll be another time, another day. Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.“

ON HAVING IT ALL

“You can’t have it all, all at once. Who—man or woman—has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.”

ON DISCRIMINATION

“I try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they’re men or women... Our daughters and sons should be free to achieve whatever their talents equip them to accomplish, with no artificial barriers blocking their way.”

ON GENDER EQUALITY

“Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn’t be that women are the exception… A gender line helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.”

ON FEMINISM

“Feminism… I think the simplest explanation, and one that captures the idea, is a song that Marlo Thomas sang, ‘Free to be You and Me.’ Free to be, if you were a girl—doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Anything you want to be. And if you’re a boy, and you like teaching, you like nursing, you would like to have a doll, that’s OK too. That notion that we should each be free to develop our own talents, whatever they may be, and not be held back by artificial barriers—manmade barriers, certainly not heaven sent.“

ON HER FELLOW SUPREME COURT JUSTICES

“We care about this institution more than our individual egos and we are all devoted to keeping the Supreme Court in the place that it is, as a co-equal third branch of government and I think a model for the world in the collegiality and independence of judges.“

ON THE 5-4 HOBBY LOBBY RULING

“Justices continue to think and can change. I am ever hopeful that if the court has a blind spot today, its eyes will be open tomorrow.”

ON BEING GIVEN THE NICKNAME THE NOTORIOUS RBG

“I think a law clerk told me about this Tumblr and also explained to me what Notorious RBG was a parody on. And now my grandchildren love it and I try to keep abreast of the latest that’s on the tumblr. … In fact I think I gave you a Notorious RBG T-shirt. I have quite a large supply.“

ON BEING AN INTERNET SENSATION

“My grandchildren love it. At my advanced age—I’m now an octogenarian—I’m constantly amazed by the number of people who want to take my picture.“

ON HER PLACE IN HISTORY

“How fortunate I was to be alive and a lawyer when, for the first time in United States history, it became possible to urge, successfully, before legislatures and courts, the equal-citizenship stature of women and men as a fundamental constitutional principle. Feminists, caring men among them, had sought just that for generations. Until the late 1960s, however, society was not prepared to heed their plea.“

ON HOW SHE’D LIKE TO BE REMEMBERED

“Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has. To do something, as my colleague David Souter would say, outside myself. Cause I’ve gotten much more satisfaction for the things that I’ve done for which I was not paid.“

As Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s body arrived in Washington for the high honor of being the only woman in the history of the United States to lie in state in the nation’s Capitol building – the Rabbi Lauren Holzbatt paid tribute to the woman who miraculously overcame all the odds to become a modern day prophet for the soul of the American nation:

‘To be born into the world that does not see you, that does not believe in your potential, that does not give you a path for opportunity, or a clear path for education and despite this, to be able to see beyond the world you are in, to imagine that something can be different. That is the job of a prophet. And it is the rare prophet who not only imagines a new world, but also makes that new world a reality in her lifetime. This was the brilliance and vision of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,’ she said.

Rabbi Lauren Holtz Tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Rest in Peace RBG. A grateful nation thanks you for a job well done.

Quality is never an Accident

Looking at travel images my sister recently posted of thousand year old gardens, neon-lit shopping arcades, authentic tea houses, 200 mph bullet trains and centuries old Shinto shrines had me reflecting how the Japanese culture is an interesting combination of the ancient and new.

In a Time magazine essay, the author Pico Iyer described how his Japanese wife Hiroko gets out of bed every morning and boils hot water to make tea for her father. It doesn’t matter to Hiroku that her father has been dead for six years. She still places the tea on the household altar along with her father’s favorite snacks.

On her days off, Hiroku travels two hours by train to talk to her grandmother – who died in 1979. She still remembers the time when she was a little girl and kicked a chair in anger. Her father told her to apologize because the chair had a soul and a heart too – and had done nothing to harm her.

Iyer observes that despite this honoring of old traditions and memories, his wife Hiroku is a modern woman in every other way – listening to Green Day on her boom box, selling semi-punk English fashion, wearing trendy leather jackets and eating “moon-burgers” from McDonalds. Japan is constantly changing on the surface, writes Iyer, but deep down, not much really changes.

A study of countries by the University of Toronto found that modern-seeming Japan finished Number 1 in how closely they carried on their ancient traditions. This comes as no surprise when you consider that Japan was a hermit kingdom during the 17th and 18th centuries, willfully walling themselves off from the rest of the world and executing citizens caught trying to leave the islands.

My sister’s recent trip brought to mind a time in my early career when I got to witness up-close the qualities of Japanese culture and industry. The year was 1989 and I was managing a New Product Introduction team. The team’s job was to audit and verify the company’s new products, making sure they were working as designed prior to their official product release. This involved working with selected customer Beta sites and training our distributors from other countries.

Two month’s before the release of one particularly important new product feature, the company’s distributor in Japan decided to send four of their customer support experts to the United States. Their mission was to work directly with the NPI team so they were properly trained and prepared to support early Japanese adopters of the product.

I was filled with amazement at how thoroughly and diligently they worked at their task. They came prepared with specific customer hardware test cases and they painstakingly spent 14 hour days running the software in every conceivable mode while trying to simulate every potential fault condition (even the ones that could likely never occur).

These Japanese Support Technicians could speak very little English but they each carried detailed notebooks which they used to successfully communicate all the problems and issues they discovered during their testing.

When they did discover true defects in the product, they were very cautious not to assign blame to individuals or to make disparaging remarks about the product or the designers. They did not want to confront anyone in a way that made them “lose face” but instead pointed to the test conditions and results – stating facts and asking open-ended questions about the results to the designers.

Watching these Japanese colleagues in action was an eye-opening experience for me and it made me realize how much more effective our NPI team would be if we adopted many of their habits and processes.

The absolute focus on quality that I observed was made even more surprising by the fact that when I was growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, products that were labeled “Made in Japan” had a reputation for low quality and inferior performance.

I started researching to understand just how it was that Japan had managed to make the jump from a country thought to make cheap products, to a country that is now universally recognized for high quality manufacturing and customer satisfaction.

I learned, ironically, that the “patron saint” of Japanese quality control was an American named W. Edwards Deming. Deming was a statistician, educator, and consultant who was a virtual unknown in America before his advocacy of quality-control methods aided Japan’s economic recovery after World War II and spurred the global success of many Japanese firms in the late 20th century.

In 1950 Japanese business leaders invited Deming to Japan to teach their executives and engineers his pioneering “Total Quality Management” (TQM) and “Statistical Quality Control” (SQC) methodologies. Japanese companies quickly adopted his methods, making a commitment to quality control that helped Japanese firms dominate product markets and become the second largest economy in the world.

The Deming Prize, established in 1951, is named in Deming’s honor and it is awarded annually to a Japanese corporation that wins a rigorous quality-control competition. It wasn’t until the 1980s that Deming’s ideas finally began to be adopted by American corporations who were seeking to compete more effectively in the world market.

After our Japanese colleagues returned to Japan I made it a point to read Deming’s influential book “Out of the Crisis” and to put many of his ideas into action within the NPI team.

Deming wrote that organizations adopting key principles of management can increase quality, improve customer loyalty and lower costs. The key to success was to practice continual improvement and to think of manufacturing as a connected system, not just as “bits and pieces.”

Deming listed 14 key points that Management must adopt to create a culture of quality in their work environment.

Deming’s 14 Points for Creating a Culture of Quality in the Workplace

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service with the aim to become competitive, stay in business and provide jobs. Managers must cultivate innovation, fund research and education and improve the product design and service – keeping in mind the customer at all times.

2. Adopt the new philosophy at all levels. Management must awaken to the challenge, learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.

3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place. You cannot inspect quality into a product. The quality is there or it isn’t by the time it’s inspected. Inspection is too late, ineffective, and costly. Quality comes not from inspection but from improving the production process. Correcting defects after a product had been manufactured is like scraping burnt toast after it has been in the toaster too long.

4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Focus instead on minimizing total cost. Move toward a single supplier fostering a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust. Negotiating on price only without regard to quality and service can drive good suppliers and good services out of business. Single-source suppliers are desirable because they can become innovative and develop an economy of scale in the production process that can only result from a long-term relationship with the purchaser. Undesirable lot-to-lot variation, which decreases quality, increases as the number of suppliers increases.

5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production. Measure key parameters and reduce variation that can lead to defects.

6. Institute training on the job. Management must understand the problems the worker has in performing his or her tasks satisfactorily. Money and time spent on this activity are ineffective unless the inhibitors to good work are removed.

7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people, machines and gadgets do a better job. Management should lead, not supervise. Leaders must know the work that they supervise. They must be empowered and directed to communicate and to act on conditions that need correction. They must learn to fix defective processes that produce faulty parts.

8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company. No one can give their best performance unless they feel secure. Employees should not be afraid to express their ideas or ask questions. Industries should embrace new knowledge that yields better job performance and employees should not be fearful that new knowledge could disclose some of their failings.

9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team to foresee problems of production and use that may be encountered by the end user. Many types of problems occur when communication is poor between departments.

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force that ask for zero defects and new levels of productivity. The bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and lay beyond the power of the work force. Exhortations, posters, targets, and slogans are directed at the wrong people, causing general frustration and resentment. Management main focus instead is to improve the process by employing statistical methods to identify and eliminate the root causes of defects.

11. Eliminate work standards (quotas, numerical goals) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership. Never-ending improvement is incompatible with quotas. Work standards, incentive pay, rates, and piecework are manifestations of management’s lack of understanding. Pride of workmanship needs to be encouraged, while the quota system needs to be eliminated. Whenever work standards are replaced with leadership people are happier and quality and productivity increase substantially.

12. Remove barriers that rob worker(s) of their right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality. This includes abolishing annual merit ratings and management by objective programs. A leader needs to be not a judge but a colleague and counselor who leads and learns with his or her people on a day-to-day basis.

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement. An organization needs good people who are improving with education. Management should be encouraging everyone to get additional education and to engage in self-improvement.

14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transfor­mation. Every job and activity is part of a process. Questions need to be asked about what changes could be made at each process stage to improve the effectiveness of other upstream or downstream stages. Everyone on a team should have a chance to contribute ideas and plans that contribute toward meeting the needs of the customer.

Becoming grounded in these 14 principles while I was still young served me well throughout my career on numerous company projects and teams. I learned that quality doesn’t happen by accident and “There is no Instant Pudding” as Deming once replied to a manager who asked him for the “secret” to producing quality products. Total Quality Management requires focused commitment, constant measurement and the drive to improve continuously.

But the most important lesson I learned from Dr. Deming and my Japanese friends is that the biggest waste is a failure to make full use of the abilities of people, to fail to take the time to learn about their job frustrations or the contributions that they are eager to make.

So the next time you are delighted with the quality of a product or service you can thank W. Edward Deming and the constancy of spirit of the Japanese people – both ancient and new.

“There’s a way to do it better – find it”

I mentioned in a previous blog about the serendipity of finding interesting or compelling books at the book swap shed of my little town’s Transfer Station. I recently finished reading a book that I happened to find there called The Grace of Great Things – Creativity and Innovation.

The author, Robert Grudin, a former professor of English at the University of Oregon, described the book as a study in creativity and innovation. The title refers to the words a monk is said to have spoken to the young child Michel Colombe (before he became a famous sculptor) as the monk observed the child forgetting to eat because carving things in wood seemed more important to him:

“Work, little one, look all you can, the steeple of St. Paul and the beautiful work of the Compagnons. Look, love God, and the grace of great things will be given to you.”

Even though I do not consider myself a particularly creative person, especially in the area of the arts, the study of creativity holds some interest for me because I have had a tendency throughout my personal and professional life to seek out innovative solutions to problems I encounter. My training in engineering and the sciences taught me to step back and look at a problem from all perspectives – and to devise solutions that are not always obvious or biased by traditional thinking.

Of all the kinds of joy in this life, none perhaps is as pure as the kind experienced when sudden insight leads to the discovery of an elegant solution to a vexing problem. I have felt this satisfaction often in my professional life while creating software applications to solve our customer’s problems and while patenting new test methods that made finding electrical defects on Electronic Printed Circuit Boards faster and safer.

The word inspiration originally meant a breath of divinity, and it seems appropriate that it is used to describe that moment when a creative solution flashes into your consciousness. To be inspired feels like a divine event – something that seems to come from beyond as the mind surrenders to a force outside its control.

Gruden’s study documented the characteristics and particular habits that creative people share and that lead to original thinking and bold ideas. Those looking to become more inventive should practice the following mental habits and attitudes that Gruden writes are most congenial to inspiration:

Passion for Work – People are often advised to find a job that they love and it appears that those who do are usually the most creative. Creativity blossoms when you fully identify with your work and see it as an expression of your character.

People who love their job, derive pleasure from it and like the border collie are happiest when they are working and have a job to do. Their passion for work inhabits the full volume of their mind and persists during leisure hours and even during their sleep. In the creative life there is no distinction between leisure and work. Creative people belong to their work, and their commitment is rewarded with unexpected discovery.

Love of the Problematic – People who spend their lives ignoring and denying problems rarely become inspired. Conversely, the minds of creative people instinctively love tackling problems and discovering solutions. Creative people are sometimes seen as troublemakers because they upset the status quo by exposing problems that have been ignored.

Thomas Edison would instruct his engineers to observe closely and pay attention to things that did not totally fit. When he saw the slightest flaws with a proposed solution he would send them back to the drawing board with the instructions “there is a better way – find it“.

Love of Beauty – Moments of creativity, when inspiration leads to the discovery of an elegant solution to a problem one has worked on so passionately are rare.

Innovative people see great beauty in these moments when they come and they strive to capture the same feeling of beauty in all the other areas of their life.

A Sense of Wholeness – Creative people are good at looking at the big picture. When examining a problem, they are able to deconstruct the individual elements that form an object and see how the various parts are interconnected.

This quality opens up perspectives that allow them to visualize the true identity of a problem and it encourages their minds to explore new thought patterns and see potential discontinuities and anomalies that others don’t.

Boldness and a Sense of Openness – A willingness to follow good ideas despite their forbidding strangeness takes courage. Creative people do not fear ideas and are willing to ignore prior assumptions and walk on the edge of chaos; opening themselves to bold new ideas even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

Innocence and Playfulness – Inventive people have a way of looking at each new project as a blank slate – unbiased by tradition and what has come before. They are like inquisitive babies trying to make sense of an item without known purpose or use.

They do not put limits on solutions (like people whose only tool is a hammer want to define define all problems as a nail) and they are happy to travel down unexpected paths (like a cook who turns a failed mousse into a successful chocolate topping).

Suffering – It is not obvious, but inspiration is related to suffering. Creative people often have to suffer through failure of experiments, the refutation of hypotheses, the trashing of one’s own findings, dead-ends, disapproval and rejection.

Even the process of achieving professional credentials is usually full of pain (endless study, practice, humiliation by teachers, competition with peers, the sting of criticism and the fear of inadequacy). Inspiration is impossible without groaning effort, without the painful winning of skill, and hard-earned expertise.

Pain has always functioned as a stimulus to material progress. It was fear pain, and grief that helped drive the great medical and social advances that exponentially increased the length of the human lifetime.

Individuals who spend their lives in the persistent avoidance of pain are not likely to amount to much. When pain and suffering is duly faced and endured, like exercise, it builds the endurance and humility that make us amenable to inspiration.

Remembrance – Many noted revolutionaries and innovators claim that their ideas were not new. They explain that they were simply maintaining continuity with the past and restoring old ideas that had been corrupted or forgotten.

Creative people utilize their remembrance of the past to invent new applications that incorporate old ideas – they are adept at rediscovering something that was always true and adapting it to a new application.

Liberty – The essence of inventiveness lies in recognizing that the world is capable of innumerable configurations. Those who have lived long and paid attention know not only that things can change – but also that it is a law of nature that they must change.

Successful people anticipate how things are changing or will change in the future and work within a system that gives them the freedom and liberty to advocate solutions that will best meet those changing needs.

People living in autocratic and rigid systems of governance do not advance as fast as those living in a free and democratic system because the barriers those societies set in place do not empower their citizens to pursue their ideas to their full potential.

When looked at together, these identified habits and attitudes map out an environment that makes the mind fertile for creativity and the growth of inspiration – planting a virtual garden for the inquiring mind to wander. For most people, visits to this garden are rare, only occurring by chance and surprise.

That is the case for me. I recognize in myself many of the qualities and characteristics that Gruden associates with creative people and I have been fortunate to experience the thrill and satisfaction that comes from discovering innovative test methods and software applications during my long work career.

But those were high points in a career that also included plenty of low points, times when the enemies of discovery (depression, complacency and laziness) took root in me. Those were unproductive times in my life because people who are lazy or just trying to get by seldom make important contributions.

I am finding that just because I am retired now doesn’t mean I need to stop striving to be creative. The habits of creative people identified by Gruden are not limited to the workplace. I find these same habits of creativity can be applied while I am fishing, while I am working on household projects, while I am coding fun software programs for my grandsons to play and even while performing my volunteering activities teaching children and serving on the school board.

It is important to mention, amidst all this praise about the delights of inspiration, that creativity does not always confine itself to happy subjects or result in happy outcomes. History, unfortunately, is filled with examples of tragic visions and genius put to use in the service of malice. Knowing that creativity can be put to dangerous applications gives us an obligation to always be on the lookout for it and to speak out against it when we see it employed in harmful ways.

In the end though I believe there is a major connection between ethics and creativity. The great majority of inventions and innovations throughout the ages have been driven by a desire to make the world a better place. That 15th century monk was on to something profoundly relevant when he linked the word grace, and the pattern of moral strengths that it suggests, as the foundation of major creative achievement.

May you practice the habits of creative thinking to free your mind and to make your life and our world a better place… so that the grace of great things will be given to you too.

Suffering is wanting what you don’t have and having what you don’t want

Buddhism is a 2500 year old religion referred to as the philosophy of awakening. Up until a hundred years ago, Buddhism was mainly an Asian philosophy but it has increasingly gained adherents in Europe and America and today it has approximately 300 million followers world-wide.

A trio of events have recently occurred by happenstance to bring the practice of Buddhism to my attention and it has led me to dig deeper into the merits of this ancient teaching and philosophy.

The first event was my participation in an online course on Mindfulness Meditation that focused on Buddhist techniques for training the mind to detach from unhelpful thoughts that can control us.

The second event was my reading of the classic Jack Kerouac novels “On the Road” and “Dharma Bums” which demonstrated how Kerouac blended the Roman Catholic faith of his youth with the free spirited Buddhist teachings being practiced by his friends to create an interesting spiritual amalgam that greatly influenced the peace loving Beat Generation.

The final event was my reading of the book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind“; in which the author, Professor Yuval Harari, argued that the move away from polytheistic religions towards monotheistic religions (like Christianity and Islam) had an overall negative impact on the course of human history.

Harari  writes that real religious troubles began for humans with the rise of monotheism:

“Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists. A religion that recognizes the legitimacy of other faiths implies either that its god is not the supreme power of the universe, or that it received from God just part of the universal truth. Since monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions. Over the last two millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently exterminating all competition.”

Harari believes that Buddhism and other enlightened eastern religions have been more beneficial to the human species because their teachings are characterized by their disregard for gods and because they do not require the acceptance of a Supreme Being to explain the origins and workings of the universe.

Buddhism is human-centered, rather than god-centered, and teaches that we must look within – not without – to find perfection and understanding. No one saves us but ourselves. Each human being has the capacity to purify the mind, develop infinite love and compassion and perfect understanding. Buddhism shifts attention from the heavens to the heart and encourages practitioners to find solutions to their problems through self-understanding.

Buddhists do not think that other religions are wrong. In fact, all religions share many common beliefs: among them that mankind’s present state is unsatisfactory, that a change of attitude and behavior is needed if the human situation is to improve and that the path to fulfillment  includes love, kindness, patience, generosity and social responsibility. It is only when believers narrowly cling to their one way of seeing things that religious intolerance, pride and self-righteousness can arise.

The first pillar of Buddhist teaching, referred to as the First Noble Truth, is that life is suffering. To live, you must suffer. It is impossible to live without experiencing some kind of suffering. We have to endure physical suffering like sickness, injury, tiredness, old age and eventually death and we have to endure psychological suffering like loneliness, frustration, fear, embarrassment, disappointment and anger.

Acknowledging that to live is to experience physical and psychological suffering is so true and obvious a statement that it cannot be denied. Unlike most religions whose central concept is a myth, or a belief that is difficult or impossible to verify, Buddhism starts with an irrefutable fact, a thing that everybody knows, that all have experienced and that all are striving to overcome. Buddhism gets right to the core of every individual human being’s concern – suffering and how to avoid it.

The Second Noble Truth of Buddhism is that all suffering is caused by craving. When we crave something but are unable to get it, we feel frustrated. When we expect someone to live up to our expectations and they do not, we feel let down and disappointed. When we want others to like us and they don’t, we feel hurt.

Even when we want something and are able to get it, it does not often lead to happiness because either we lose interest in it or we begin to fear that something will happen that causes us to lose it. Stated simply, the Second Noble Truth teaches that suffering results from wanting what you don’t have and having what you don’t want. This wanting and worrying deprives us of contentment and happiness.

It is remarkable that Socrates, even though he held polytheistic views, and lived before Buddhism was established, came to the same conclusions regarding the root cause of suffering in his writings:

“If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.”

The Third Noble Truth explains how suffering can be overcome and how true happiness and contentment can be achieved. It involves developing a reflective mind in order to let go of delusions and to ponder things objectively without forming an opinion on whether they are good, bad, useful or useless. By training the mind to reject, relinquish and renounce the bottomless pit of our cravings, suffering can be gradually lessened and eliminated.

When we give up useless craving and learn to enjoy each day, without restless wanting, the experiences that life offers us, patiently enduring the problems that life involves without fear, hatred and anger, then we become happy and free. It is only then that we begin to live fully. When we are no longer obsessed with satisfying our own selfish wants, we are free from suffering and we have time to enjoy the present as it is. We  achieve what the Buddhists call Nirvana.

My limited look into the Buddhist faith and practices have been beneficial and thought provoking. I would recommend others to look into it as well because from my point of view its practices have been good for the world, it is praised by the wise and many have observed that when it is practiced it leads to happiness.

One factor in my consideration of Buddhism that was important to me is that I could not identify any practices of the Buddhists that would be incompatible with my Catholic faith. In fact, the two religions seem to reinforce one another and I can see how Jack Kerouac was able to harmonize Catholicism with Buddhism without becoming conflicted. He considered Jesus and Buddha spiritual brothers.

I believe in a higher power because I have personally felt a God presence guiding my steps throughout life, but I also believe in the capacity of the human mind to positively control our thoughts and actions.  We all could benefit from the ancient wisdom found in both traditions.

“Watch out for your blind spots”

My wife recently attended a 4-Day Christian ACTS retreat. The retreats are designed to help participants grow into a deeper relationship with God and encourage the Church community of faith to become more vibrant.

The Gospel reading at the closing celebration Mass was taken from Luke 16:19-31; when Jesus tells the Pharisees a parable comparing two men; a rich man who dressed in fine linen and dined sumptuously every day; and a poor man who lay outside the rich man’s door, hoping to just get a scrap of the food that fell from his table. Both men died and Jesus says that the poor man was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham, while the rich man fell to the netherworld and a life of everlasting torment.

During the homily, the priest remembered that when he was a young man learning how to drive his father would always remind him to “look out for your blind spots“. These were the spots around the car that could not be seen by the mirrors. His father taught him the importance of being aware of those blind spots so he could avoid accidents and potential tragedies.

The priest went on to say that retreats are valuable because they provide us with an opportunity to stop, evaluate our life, check for blind spots and then make the necessary corrections to adjust our life so that we avoid potential disaster and tragedy.

Luke’s Gospel story did not specifically say that the poor man was especially good or that the rich man was evil and treated the poor man badly. It could be that the rich man felt that he was living a righteous life and felt pride that he was a well-liked and respected member of his community.

But the rich man had a blind spot – he could not see the need right outside his door – or understand why it was any of his concern. He could not see what he could not see – and it ended up in tragedy for him.

That is why it is a good exercise for us to look at ourselves through other people’s eyes every now and then. To step back and take an objective look at how we are perceived by those around us who are able to clearly see our blind spots. Even more important is to ask ourselves how our actions as well as our inactions would be seen in the eyes of God.

If the rich man in the Gospel story had done this, maybe he would have noticed those blind spots in his life that were leading him to disaster – and made the necessary corrections in his life that would have carried him to bosom of Abraham.