What It Takes To Be Great, To Be Remembered

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Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
- Robert F. Kennedy

The biggest steps in life are often taken by the smallest people. Or by people others mistakenly assumed were small.

Napoleon, Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan come to mind. I believe that Alexander the Great was a tad on the small size as well. Joan of Arc never made it out of her adolescence.

These people risked their lives in battle and were able to rally many to their causes. In a sense, all failed ultimately, even Genghis Khan who was losing control of his troops in his latter years (some said he was insane).

Yet of all the people who have gone before us in history, almost all are nameless to us. Only a few names can be recognized by people around the world.

We all want to be recognized in our lifetimes for our achievements. And most of us want to be remembered positively after we die for our deeds and our successes. Yet how many warriors who lived before your own time can you name? Given the chance, I'll bet you could name more famous scientists than warriors. Newton. Einstein. Copernicus. Others of you could name stars of science from the great Islamic period, or from India or China. Names of philosophers will trip off the tongues of many.

These people all took great risks, not just to test their scientific hypotheses or philosophical treatises, but sometimes to make their results public. Copernicus only made his discoveries public just before he died because he was afraid of being fired and excommunicated by the church, his employer. Newton was imprisoned and almost snuffed for his discoveries, or he would have been if he had not recanted his "erroneous" statements of discovery. The falling apple was the least of Newton's worries.

Even scientists of today take great risks when making their discoveries public. Remember the outrage that faced the two scientists in the early 1990s who announced their discovery of cold fusion to the media before it was printed in a scientific journal and reviewed by their peers? They found it hard to get work anywhere that didn't require them to ask customers if they wanted "fries with that?" Now a cold fusion production facility is nearing completion in Europe and another is planned for the US. The two scientists, however, never recovered their reputations.

Greatness comes with risks. If it were easy, everyone would want to be famous for their greatness, then very little would ever be considered great again.

Greatness, the condition that allows people to be remembered for their deeds long after their deaths, is not for the faint of heart. Those who would be remembered for generations must be willing to take great risks of failing, or of being failed by others who have something to lose by the deeds or something to gained by criticizing the great deeds of others.

If you improve the life of one other person in your lifetime, your time here was well spent. If you improve the lives of many others, you deserve to be remembered, no matter in what form the improvement was made.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to teach children what they need to succeed, to thrive and to be remembered if they so choose.
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The Difference Between Your Illusions And Reality

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How beautiful it would be to see man wrestle with his illusions and vanquish them.
- Naguib Mahfouz, Egyptian writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988 (1911-2006)

What a spectacle! There's nothing that some people like better than to watch someone destroy themselves. But is that what Mahfouz intended?

Indeed, is it even possible to wrestle with our own illusions without destroying ourselves?
Illusions are all we have to work with when we perceive the world. We believe what we see, hear, taste, touch and smell is the real thing. But it's never the same as someone else who experiences the exact same thing.

One of the closest possible human relationships is marriage. Yet as much as people share in a marriage and as close to sharing the same experiences and goals as people get, when they separate or divorce they seldom think that the relationship failed for the same reasons. Indeed, each usually believes that the other was responsible for the breakup. They don't even remember the same events that were such good experiences the same way.

If you want a real shock, sit a few friends down with you, individually, and ask them to candidly describe you, the kind of person you are, your likes and dislikes, what you are like as a friend, your attitudes toward the world around you. It would be extremely rare for any of them to be accurate or similar. What's more, none will be like your own impression of yourself.

We have not just an opinion about ourselves, but an illusion about who we are. No one else shares that illusion because no one else has or can experience the world around us the same way we have or do. Even the timing of experiences affects our impressions of reality. The same experience in early childhood is perceived much differently in adulthood.

When we go to sleep, we dream a kind of reality that we can't support as "real" when we are awake. Yet the truth is that no one is certain which is reality and which is mere illusion, the wakeful perceptions or the dreams. Our brains function differently when we dream than when we are awake. Even our own brain can't tell which is real to it and which is not. To our brain, both are real, just different realities.

Most of us convince ourselves that our waking experiences are the real ones, but that is what we have been taught since early childhood. ("It's only a dream. It's not real.")

Mahfouz meant that it would be beautiful if we were to tackle our misguided illusions and vanquish them. That is, the ones that are too far away from the reality that others perceive of us. In his way he is saying that he wants us all to deal with the realities of the world in the same way, as if we were each one component of a greater entity or reality.

Would that make us all followers, pets of a greater power that determines the fates of all of us? Some believe that to be true anyway. Others believe that free will is our blessing.

No matter which way we choose for our life, we choose our own illusions. If that is the case, it only makes sense to choose the ones that will serve us well over the long term, instead of the many harmful components that people choose for themselves for the short term.

And how long is the long term anyway? Some say it ends when we die. Others say that this life is but one small part of a continuum or that this life is an individual experience set that we will use when we rejoin the greater entity after death.

Choose your illusions wisely.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about guiding children to create safe and productive personal illusions for their lives so that they can be confident and competent adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The Secret Of Super Human Love

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.... Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love the greater the jealousy.
- Robert Heinlein

I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.
- Mother Teresa

Though Mother Teresa and Robert Heinlein may have been speaking of different kinds of love (though not necessarily), I believe these two quotations fit together well.

Love may be the most mysterious of emotions. All emotions are mysterious to us because we know so little about them. Imagine trying to explain to a non-homo sapiens sapiens (the double use of sapiens is correct, as neanderthalensis is also a homo sapiens) our emotion of fear, or melancholy, or joy. The word love, however, often requires the most space of any definition in an English dictionary.

Heinlein says that love is a healthy condition, yet many people who feel they have been betrayed in love believe that love is a risky condition because it involves trust and trust can be betrayed. If you can't trust, then you can't love fully, so you can't offer the kind of commitment that most love partners seek in a relationship.

Jealousy is not a malformed version of love, as many believe. Beneath the surface mistrust of a jealous person lurks the dark secret belief that he or she is either not worthy of the love of the other person or that the other does not love them fully, completely, only. Jealousy is not so much a badly formed kind of love but rather is a form of self hate. A person who dislikes or hates themself is incapable of forming a healthy kind of love relationship with another.

Living with a person who dislikes themself and is jealous of another they purport to love will inevitably develop a sour, if not hateful, relationship.

Mother Teresa had the solution. She was under no misconceptions about humans and their love being perfect. She harboured no resentment toward those who could not return the level or kind of love she offered. She didn't forgive people their defects and limited kinds of love, she disregarded these completely.

The Mother cast all limitations aside and told us to love without reservation, without restriction, without bounds of any kind. She was so busy loving others that the fact they could not return it the same way was unimportant to her. She gave so much love without any hesitation that others could not help but love her in return. She was loved, to varying degrees, not by one, but by millions, people who would have done anything she asked of them. Indeed, many still do what she asked of them, years after her death.

Love has a most peculiar characteristic: the more you give it away, the more you get of it in return. It's impossible to become impoverished of love because you gave yours all away. You can only become rich with love by giving it.

True, some people will mistrust, some will betray, some will hold their own love in reserve. That will only matter to you if you love only one person. That doesn't mean that you should have sex with as many people as possible. Sex is entirely a separate issue from love. You may have sex with someone you love, but having sex with someone you don't love or about whom you have reservations is far less satisfying. The latter is more of a "sex for pleasure" thing, based on the "sex for reproduction" commandment of our hormones.

Love with restrictions or reservations is not the kind of healthy love spoken about by either Heinlein or Mother Teresa. A person who gives away true love freely to everyone is never without support when one of the recipients betrays their love and trust. There are always others to fill the void.

Giving anything away to excess is something most societies teach is wrong, even immoral. That condition has never applied to love, to the best of my knowledge and from my studies of many societies and religions.

Learning how to cast aside all inhibitions and self imposed limitations in order to love everyone freely, now that's a challenge. No one can teach that.

However, here's a hint. You have to love and respect yourself first before you can love and respect others freely. And you would be well advised to ignore the imperfections and faults of others you hope to give your love to. After all, you expect them to ignore or forgive yours.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to teach children the knowledge and skills of love and other topics that will allow them to grow into competent, confident and loving adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Why We Need Opposition To Grow

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O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us! (Oh would some power the gift give us, to see ourselves as others see us.)
- Robert Burns, poet (1759-1796)

Quite apart from the shock some might get from seeing how much spelling of English words has changed from the time of Burns until now (despite the fact that he spells according to his Scottish accent), the wish expressed doesn’t apply to everyone.

Some people don’t want to know how others see them because they don’t care. They are, they believe, as close to perfection as they can get. Arrogant and self absorbed, maybe, but that’s how they are.

Some don’t want to know how others see them because they fear what they might learn about themselves. They tend to hide from that reality and pretend a different one.

Many people care very much how others see them. Not only do they assess their own worth according to the opinions others have about them, they feel crushed when they learn that someone doesn’t like them. Or when someone whose opinion differs from theirs defends their own as if no other opinion is important or relevant, they lose their sense of the value of their own opinion.

In a world where almost everyone cares more about themselves than they do about anyone else, it can be risky to depend on the opinions of others about us as true indicators of our self worth. By nature and definition, anyone who cares more about themselves than about anyone else will want to evaluate anyone else at a lower level them themselves. They will be incapable of evaluating others fairly.

It’s self destructive to pay attention to anyone’s opinion about ourselves if that person always puts themselves first.

We need at least to have some people think well of us in order to have them as friends and loved ones. As social beings who need both social contact with others of our own kind and touch from those we love and who love us, living a well balanced life requires some people to like us enough to provide for our needs as we would provide for theirs.

We need touch as much as we need shelter and clothing. Without it we turn to other forms of gratification, including seeking power and money, abuse of others who are weaker, buying what we like to excess, becoming workaholics and adopting addictions or thrill-seeking habits that border on addiction.

What a few others think of us is extremely important for the continuation of good relationships with them. But it’s not necessary that everyone like us. Burns wanted to know how others think of him, but he didn’t say that he would turn himself inside out if he didn’t like what they thought.

The opinions of some people about us--indeed of most people--simply don’t matter. Nor should they. We have no need to live our lives to please any more than a few others, those who matter most to us.

There are times when we may need others to oppose us and make critical statements about our work. An artist, for example, does work of little value if everyone likes it. If everyone likes a work, that means that all or almost all care little about it but want to spare the feelings of the author of the work. The artist needs some opposition in order to grow, opposition against which to build something new, to expand horizons, to climb higher, to become more skilled.

Without that opposition, the artist may believe that he has reached his peak and go downhill from there. He lacks incentive to better his work without opposition.

That much applies to every one of us who greatly respects ourselves. If everyone likes us, then no one cares much about us. An example would be the roadies or groupies that follow rock groups or fan clubs of movie stars. Their affections evaporate with the first or second major failure of their idols.

To have a clear sense of self worth and a good idea of our strengths and weaknesses, we need to have others who will tell us straight what they think about our work. And sometimes about ourselves. It may be harsh, but it’s necessary.

No one climbs a mountain if it’s coated with cotton balls and kitten fluff.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to teach children what they need to know about themselves and how they can grow strong and healthy in a balanced way to become competent and confident adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

What If It All Came Crashing Down?

The real measure of our wealth is how much we'd be worth if we lost all our money.
- John Henry Jowett, preacher (1864-1923)

Imagine it!

Donald Trump, poor. He’d just be an annoying boor. No, no, he’s that already. I meant a poor, annoying…..No, everyone would just ignore him.

Bill Gates, poor. Once the world’s richest man, Bill has been giving away billions of dollars to charities over the past few years, not the least huge sums for AIDS research and literacy projects (through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). He’s an entrepreneur, someone who scooped great ideas from other people and turned them into a worldwide empire. Bill would make out alright because he knows how to manage people, to make them feel good about being successful working for projects he operates.

In 1929, with the crash of the stock markets and the beginning of the Great Depression, so many paper-wealthy men went broke overnight that many of them jumped out of windows in their top floor offices on Wall Street. That’s a statement not about their not wanting to be poor, but about the value they placed on their own lives without a great deal of money to throw around.

I see hordes of people in North American cities (my home continent, so those are the people I see in person and on television) creating lives for themselves based on the values preached to them by industries. The descriptive word I can’t escape from to attach to their lives is pretension. They are the people they believe they are. They live the lives that industry wants them to live, holding the values and beliefs that industry teaches them by various means. They have none of their own.

They have no idea of their basic human worth, other than as they compare themselves to others according to their financial net worth and their ostentatious possessions.

Poor people, on the other hand, seem to have a clear grasp of who they are in real terms. They know they are at the bottom of the heap socially as well as financially. Many of them use their position to their advantage, accepting social assistance from governments who collect tax money from the rich. Others, especially those on whom poverty has come to stay due to misfortune, health problems or physical/intellectual limitations, see their lives as one continual climb out of the pit that life has thrown them into.

Perhaps the people who have the clearest idea of who they are and the value they have to the world are the homeless, especially those who have been homeless for several years. They form friendships, bonds and working relationships based on what they can offer to others and what they can get from others.

The homeless are valued as people, among themselves, more than any other social group because all they have to offer anyone else is themselves. They value each other and who they are in relation to the others in their lives. To the homeless, a smile has a value beyond anything a rich person could imagine.

True, some can’t survive in that atmosphere. They turn to drugs and alcohol, paid for by robbing others and from begging. That’s a form of self destruction, a long, slow death wish fulfilled by their own choice. They can’t make it, even among the community of the homeless, because they don’t believe they have anything of value to offer to others. The best some can do is to offer drugs or drink to others like them, giving themselves the same sense of self worth as the rich.

Imagining ourselves as suddenly without any source of income and sustenance is an exercise that each of us should indulge ourselves in once in a while. It can help us to be humble about who we are and appreciative of what we have. Most importantly, it can help us to calculate who in our lives loves us for ourselves and not for what we have or can give to them.

It could happen, that kind of life altering tragedy. A power outage that lasts for several weeks could cause us to turn to our baser instincts in our drive to survive. A pandemic disease of the type that medical science keeps warning us about, one that kills millions of people in a short period of time, could change everything we know about our civilization.

Staying in touch with reality, not the kind that industry wants us to believe but the kind we could use in case of some dire emergency, should be on the agenda of each one of us once in a while.

It tells us who we really are, what we stand for and who would stand with us if the world we know shattered.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to teach the fundamentals and basic skills of life to children so that they can cope with any emergency they face as adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

How Bad Are Your Problems Really?

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The manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be endured.
- Dean Acheson, US politician (1893-1971)

I find it hard to appreciate that everyone has problems, not just me. No, I didn't mean that I am a problem for everyone, though that would be a distinction that would be difficult to resist.

Furthermore, my problems are worse than those of everyone else. At least it seems that way.
The fact is that we seldom see others at times when they are in the process of expressing their problems. A drunk won't admit that he's drunk, even to himself. A drug addict may confess that he's high, but will not likely admit that he is an addict. Few addicts of any kind admit to their addiction, which is why Alcoholics Anonymous and similar organizations have their new members admit from the start that they are addicts before they will be helped.

Some parents are terrified of what may happen with their children as they go through the teens years. They would never admit this because it might give others the impression that they're bad parents, or inadequate for the job.

When my computer breaks down or my car is in the shop I feel as if I am at the brink of panic, that life is conspiring against me. Or at least that the gods of technology have a grudge against me.

To many people a computer or a car needing repair would be a minor inconvenience. Especially if the computer or the car is mine, not their own.

Our own problems always seem to be worse than those of others. But then, except for the rare instances of friends crying on the shoulders of other close friends, we seldom learn of the problems of others, the ones that bother them most.

As a sociologist, I am interested in the phenomenon that people almost inevitably consider their own problems worse than the problems of anyone else, to the point where I have studied it--albeit on an anecdotal basis--to see if my experience jives with that of others. It does.

Generally speaking, we don't know the problems of others. When we learn them we find that ours are not so bad after all.

A few years ago I did a study where I exposed several test subjects to the problems of others, without giving any names. I chose the problem sets of average people, of rich people, of people of good health and those with physical or mental handicaps, people just struggling through the rigours of their lives like most of us.

While the results confirmed my hypothesis, I was still shocked at how consistent everyone was. Not a single person was prepared to exchange their own problems for the problems of anyone else. A few noted that some people seemed to have few problems, though they were perhaps more severe. The people with fewer problems were usually those with physical or mental handicaps.

Though our problems seem worse than those of others, we don't want to exchange problems with anyone else if we have the chance. When we compare our own problems with those of others we realize not that ours are easier to solve but that they are easier to manage than the less well known problems of others.

Some of our problems we can't solve. They tend to be those whose origins lie in our early years of childhood. The best we can do with them is to learn to manage their effects on us and on others. An obvious form of this is how someone who loses a leg adapts to new ways of conducting their life and doesn't want to be treated as a "cripple." We learn to adapt and work around our early childhood problems or we become emotional cripples.

Your problems may seem bad to you, but you wouldn't want to trade them for the problems of anyone else if you knew the full depth and breadth of theirs.

Keep that in mind when you find yourself gazing enviously at people you see on television, people with talent, features and characteristics you don't have. They also have problems you wouldn't want.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to teach children the knowledge and skills they need to be able to manage their problems as adults, rather than having them succumb to addictions, abuse, thrill-seeking or other forms of escape from their problems.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Key Lessons In Human Relationships

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Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you. Love me and I may be forced to love you.
- William Arthur Ward, US inspirational writer (1921-1994)

This quote captures concisely the essence of all human relationships.

People believe flattery about themselves because they want to believe it. How many well known women have listened to flattery from their dressmaker about how beautiful they look in his creation, only to find themselves later on the annual Blackwell list of worst dressed women or on the pages of some scandal sheet whose purpose is to show the lack of taste of famous people?

Flattery may more commonly be called the "white lie." The truth may be known to both the speaker and the receiver, but the receiver would rather hear the lie. Would rather believe the lie than the truth.

In some cases the truth is kept from the receiver "to prevent them from being hurt." Almost without exception that person hurts more when the truth is found out later.

Who can trust a person who lies to them? A fan or worshipper may be encouraged to provide a white lie, but a true friend would not. A true friend, not the friends that are more akin to business arrangement partners.

People don't like criticism, even if it's true and constructive. Some people appreciate constructive criticism because it helps them to improve, but they are in the minority. Written criticism is always taken to be destructive and is more emotionally hurting than the kind delivered face to face.

What's the problem? Most of us don't know how to deliver constructive criticism tactfully, in a helpful manner. The use of language we teach our children tends to be for the purpose of conveying a message directly or the kind that tells a fictional story in an interesting manner. We don't teach the language of diplomacy, which may explain why we have so many unresolvable conflicts among friends, problems that trash the relationships.

People are most hurt and over a longer period of time by being ignored. A child cries to get attention, not because of an injury. Some parents claim "Oh, he's just crying to get attention, he's not really hurt." They don't understand that a child can't get too much attention, can't overdose on attention and love. If the parent of an attention-demanding child withholds attention and love because they child has "already had enough," the parent hasn't been providing the kind of love and attention and support the child needs.

Couples who "draw apart" and find themselves "going in different directions" with their lives have not paid enough attention to each other, to the needs and desires of the other. In particular, they have not give enough of themselves to the need of the other for human touch. More couples separate because one needs more loving touch than he or she is receiving than for any other reason. That's what sexual affairs are all about and studies show that two-thirds of men and more than half of women have affairs while married.

As social beings, we need attention desperately. Being ignored may be the worst thing that one person can do to another who wants attention. For a child, being ignored (not receiving enough loving attention) often results in values that are twisted by community standards. Many prison inmates, patients of psychiatric hospitals and gulpers of Prozac had childhoods where they didn't receive as much attention from their parents as they needed. Some had too much of the wrong kind, of course.

"Encourage me and I will not forget you." Think back to your favourite teacher, neighbour or relative and chances are good that those people encouraged you. Their encouragement helped you to become the marvellous person you are today.

"Love me and I will be forced to love you" is an odd way of delivering this message. But it gets the point across. Many people stay with their mates because the mate loves them unequivocally and unstintingly. Many people agree to marry their partner because they recognize that the partner loves them completely. Couples come together in the first place because they each believe the other loves them.

Love attracts people. The adoration of fans of sports, movie or television stars drives many of them to be as outstanding as they are because they need that kind of love.

The world revolves around love, at least the human component of it. People lacking a sufficient amount of the love they need do some unusual, strange, even illegal or anti-social things to get the attention of the person of their desire. Ask yourself if the rich, the powerful or the war-mongering people you have known (even from seeing them on television) get enough of the human kind of good love or if they lacked it and turned to another form of gratification in its absence.

Being forced to love someone in Ward's sense of the word means that a person may not be able to resist the love of another person if that love is sincere and true. Love is attractive.

Love is the most powerful force of humanity, especially effective if the love of many people is joined together for a collective work of good.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to teach children the lessons from this article as well as many others they need to thrive.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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How To Lead An Exciting And Fulfilling Old Age

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Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom. - Theodore Isaac Rubin

Wisdom seems to be not just a forgotten art, but a lost objective of humanity.

Over two millennia ago people like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (among many others) committed their thoughts to writing (Socrates, thanks to Plato) and their thinking is revered as great wisdom today.

There were great writers of wisdom during the Roman era. Then the world went into the Dark Ages and almost no one wrote anything considered wise today. That's right, isn't it?

Actually, no. As much as possible of the wisdom of the past was destroyed by the Church of Rome after the fall of the western part of the Roman Empire in order that only church writing could be considered truth and taught to the uneducated flocks.

Meanwhile, in what we today call the Middle East, South Asia and the Far East, civilization and its authors of great wisdom carried on with great flourish and progress. Those of us in the west may not be as aware of their writing as we should be because these people thoughtlessly and discourteously wrote in languages other than English.

English speakers, being the inherent snobs they are, refused to acknowledge that anything of value could have taken place or been written down in any language other than English, Latin or the successors of Latin--in other words the languages of western Europe. Arabs, Indians and Chinese, for example, had marvellously well developed cultures during Europe's Dark Ages and Middle Ages.

If it had not been for some daring Irish monks who hid away written works when the rest of Europe was ravaged by a series of tribes, we would have no western history before the medieval period. Those Irish monks literally saved western history from disappearing forever. And western wisdom.

Europeans really started to roll during the Renaissance, though written work was still heavily censored or altered by the church.

Where is the written work that records the wisdom of today? Do we have no wise people today?
Schools for common folk (as opposed to just for children of the nobility) began in the 17th century, then continued to become more universal in the west until the end of the 19th century. The more people that learned to read, the more began to write. With the printing press, books became more common and available at reasonable prices for the ordinary household.

Today publishers (including self publishers) in the United States alone put out about 200,000 different titles each year. The problem is not finding books to read, but finding good books from among this massive number, then finding time to read as many as one might like to gain wisdom.

As it happens, a recent study showed that only about six percent of the adult population of North America reads more than three books per year. When you consider that many professionals must read books within their professional specialties in order to stay abreast of developments, that leave precious few of us who read books regularly.

Must we read books in order to become wise? It's not that simple, of course. Reading a variety of book subjects and genres forces the brain to work in ways that few other activities of life do. Experience alone doesn't make a person wise. Reading alone doesn't either. Nor does education of various sorts. It's the combination of all of these that develops a brain environment that is conducive to wisdom.

Wisdom is also not something that happens quickly. It takes decades and a devotion to learning for that whole time. It also requires a commitment to teaching what we learn so that others may develop their own form of wisdom. It's impossible to know or even to guess how many people have gained wisdom from the teachings of Socrates over 2400 years ago.

Just as becoming an athlete of Olympic calibre requires a combination of commitment and learning in a variety of ways, becoming a wise person requires learning and teaching in a variety of ways. Teaching itself becomes a form of learning (docendo disco).

The human body is designed to become weaker and less coordinated as we age. However, the human brain is designed to grow, gaining knowledge and wisdom for as long as we live. Our overall design shows that our well developed brain should take over as the most important organ of our bodies when other body functions begin to get well past their prime.

Dementia is what happens to those who don't follow that pattern. Dementia is preventable, totally, by each individual. Old people who become stupid have allowed their brains to atrophy along with the rest of their bodies as they age, until not much worthwhile of anything remains. For others, they are at their peak of wisdom in their senior years.

Research is even taking place now to see if Alzheimer's Disease may be prevented or slowed considerably in people with very active brains. My grandfather died of Alzheimer's and I watched him decline to becoming a baby in an ancient body. I don't intend to allow myself to go that way.

OK, the light has turned green. Get thinking. Wise up!

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how, what and when to teach children what they need to know to lead fulfilling and fruitful lives, right to their dying day.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

How So Many People Screw Up Their Lives

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One day at a time- this is enough. Do not look back and grieve over the past, for it is gone; and do not be troubled about the future, for it has not yet come. Live in the present, and make it so beautiful that it will be worth remembering.
- Ida Scott Taylor, author

While this sounds like an advertisement for existentialism or nihilism, it was not intended that way. Mrs. Taylor is concerned that so many people dwell on the hurts of the past or work so hard for benefits in the future that they miss living today.

If you are not one of those, how fortunate you are.

Carrying around the hurts of your past is literally like carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. It's the weight of your world, a world that no longer exists. The rest of humanity has moved on. Most never knew about your problem in the first place and don't care about it now. Whoever hurt you very likely is not suffering in the slightest.

Then there are the workaholics who invest their lives in a future they seldom accept has arrived. They become so accustomed to working continuously that they can't break out of the habit. For them, the future they work so hard to achieve never arrives. What they manage to do is to spend some of the money they have accumulated to buy ostentatious toys and decorations for themselves and for those who will be generous enough to show their love and admiration for them.

Almost inevitably, these people raise children who follow the same habits and hold the same values as theirs. Kids tend to become like their parents because their parents are usually the only full role models they have to follow.

In the Canadian province where I live, I drive past many properties whose main feature outside of the houses is grass. How beautiful and aromatic is the scent of grass? It's a weed that has been selected by rich people who own mansions as a way to cover endless amounts of land without bothering with flowers, decorative shrubs or trees.

We have parks filled with grass, most of which have signs telling people to stay off it. Heaven forbid the most boring plant on the face of the planet should die under the footsteps of people enjoying themselves with some form of entertainment other than admiring their lawns or cutting them.

People, kids and adults alike, are much more likely to find creative things to do on dirt than on grass. Grass is--at least to those of us who live in North America--the ultimate way to beautifying property.

Grass is not for living today but for having neighbours and family admire it. In fact, nobody cares about anyone's grass but their own. But we don't acknowledge that hypocrisy.

How can you live today? I don't want to answer that question for you. For many people living for today means shopping.

No one ever got to heaven by shopping. I can't say that for certain, but it seems like a safe guess. Shopping is perceived as "fun" by those who have been brainwashed by industries--primarily in the fashion and cosmetics fields--whose very existence is based on selling people stuff they don't need.

Those who spend time working in their gardens, hiking in the wilderness or trying to accomplish something no one has done before know how to live for today. Just working to improve yourself so that you are better at something than you used to be is a way of living for today.

Remember this: to live for today we don't need to spend our money, we need to invest our time wisely.

Money is not the treasure. Time is our only treasure. The only time we know anything about for certain is now.

If this means something to you, you have just invested your last few minutes wisely.

Congratulations! Now move on.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to invest your time with your children and grandchildren wisely, in ways they will appreciate and remember for the rest of their own lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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Educated Rant: Paris Hilton, Successful Disgrace

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"Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit."
- Conrad Hilton

Paris Hilton seems to have adopted the Hilton maxim. Look how successful she is.
If that seemed like a criticism, it wasn't. Paris Hilton knows what she wants--fame--and she gets it. As Conrad (great grandfather of Paris) recommended, she keeps moving, keeps doing things that keep her in the news. Fame and glamour are what she wants and she has been extremely successful at getting it.

Over the past several decades, primarily before the 1990s, citizens of western world countries were taught that by now we would have ample amounts of leisure time in which to amuse ourselves or to be amused. We wouldn't be short of money because technology would make our lives so simple that we could earn more than enough to keep us in luxury by working only two or three days a week.

Corporations latched onto that idea and began to provide us with things to do that would occupy our time even before our working hours and days were reduced. We got television, then videos, now movies and TV programs on our cell phones if we want them. We liked it. We cottoned onto the easy life.

We spent hours every day sitting in front of the tube, watching mindless pap that amused us but kept us from thinking. The appetites we had from our days of high activity remained with us while our energy expenditure decreased greatly. Some of us saved that extra energy intake on our bellies, our thighs and our butts.

Though we had the start of the life of leisure, we didn't manage to get the extra time off work. Some of us realized that not only was extra time off not coming, but if we wanted to have more of the luxuries that were offered we had to work longer hours to earn more income. Today some of us work 60, even 80 or 90 hour weeks.

Didn't that affect our family lives? Sure, but they were falling apart anyway. We learned how to relax to excess or to work to excess to earn more money, but we didn't know what to do with raising kids. That was OK because they no longer wanted to have much to do with us. We didn't talk because we didn't have interests in common. The kids developed their own dialect with words we parents didn't understand. That wasn't so bad because most parents didn't want to know what their kids were talking about.

We all kept moving, kept making mistakes, kept forging our lives wherever they were bound to lead us. Conrad would have been proud of us.

Maybe not proud of Paris or her sister Nicky. But then, our kids are like Paris and Nicky too, to some extent. Too many of them.

Conrad Hilton got what he wanted. He became one of the richest men in the world. Paris got what she wanted, fame and notoriety (it went with the task of getting news coverage daily). What did we get?

We got broken families. In many classrooms today no more than 25 percent of the students live with both their birth parents. We got drugs. We got teen suicide at unprecedented levels. We got murder so common that radio and television stations don't even report them any more.

We got gangs that didn't replace the former underworld of organized crime, but added to it. We got depression so common that it's almost a social disease. We got road rage and office rage. We got school shootings. We got dependency on prescribed drugs, therapists, so many people with unfit brains that they can't all be kept in institutions.

And we call ourselves successful. Political conservatives say that our social problems are nothing more than side effects of our enormous success as a society. They don't mind having to take Prozac to come down and Viagra to get up.

They also say that the rest of the world envies us because of our wealth. It doesn't. The rest of the world hates us (or at least thinks we are a poison to humanity) because we have sold our souls to the devil. Or to Toyota, the drug manufacturers and political spinmeisters who can convince us that anything their candidate does is just grand.

There is one thing we missed out on in our quest for heaven on earth. The ability to think. We allowed ourselves to have it programmed out of us.

Why do so many teens do stupid things? They want to object to the unconscionable realities that we have accepted for ourselves and want to impose on them. They aren't brain dead yet, so they keep kicking as long as they can.

Who's to blame? That's another thing we adopted, a penchant for always blaming others for our mistakes. Guess what? It doesn't matter who is to blame. What matters is if we and enough others like us want to make our lives and the lives of our children, grandchildren and the people of the rest of the world better.

We can only begin with teaching children. That's how it works. From the day they are born they are clay models we mold, day by day, incident by incident, neglected or rejected moment by neglected or rejected moment. They become what we make them, one way or another. They have no innate abilities to become anything else.

We need to start teaching children properly. Not reading and writing, since those are already taught in schools. We need to teach them how to grow to become competent and confident adults.

We can't do that as it is now because most of us don't know how. If we did, we would have been teaching them. We need to teach young adults and teens how to be good parents, how to provide what their children of the future will need, when they need it and how they need it to be fed to them.

Don't stop moving on this when you finish reading this article. Talk it up among your neighbors and family, your workmates and fellow churchgoers, at your Home and School gatherings and political meetings.

Get something started. Nothing will improve without you. There aren't very many of us yet who know what we need. Remember, the conservatives are trying to tell us that everything's all right, that the universe is unfolding as it should. We need to tell them and everyone else that it isn't.

We need to begin teaching our children properly. Today.

Do your part. Keeping talking about it. We need to help each other through a tough transition period.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about what children need to learn and when and who should teach it. And it has guides for teachers and parents who influence our kids the most.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Imagine Donald Trump Or Conrad Black...

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Be gentle with yourself, learn to love yourself, to forgive yourself, for only as we have the right attitude toward ourselves can we have the right attitude toward others.
- Wilfred Peterson, author

To some this quote will sound like a load of namby-pamby crap for addle-brained self-delusional wimps. As it happens, this article is about them. Not for them because they believe that everything is right with the world as they see it.

We have two kinds of people who live with more than their share of fear. One acknowledges it, the other pretends it doesn't exist.

We're more than familiar with the phobias, such as claustrophobia and agoraphobia. We're a little less familiar with those people who live in fear of failure, or being hurt or of being criticized. They're around us but we don't see much of this fear because they learn to disguise it well.

What few of us may realize is that the people who seem least afraid of anything, who act aggressively, who bully others and who actively and consciously try to put down or defeat others as signs of their own power have their own fears.

The greatest of their fears is that they may be found out. Found out about being inadequate, incompetent or unprepared for whatever task they must do. To compensate for this fear they overdo behaviour in the opposite direction. They act the exact opposite of what they feel deep inside.

They exude confidence--even overconfidence--between bouts of aggressive behaviour, but it's more bravado than reality. Mostly this gives them time to figure out who to blame for the next thing that goes wrong.

They always blame others for what goes wrong. Not only do they not admit ever having done anything wrong, the ones who are better at covering their true selves refuse to address the possibility that they have done something wrong. They won't even talk about it.

Witness some politicians when appearing in court, or civil servants appearing in front of a committee of government. The upper level ones act as if its beneath them to have to be there, let alone consider the possibility that they have done something wrong. Their underlings or associates always did whatever is wrong, if anything.

Big business executives who act arrogant enough that we think they must eat razor blades for breakfast are really like soured butterscotch pudding inside. The longer they are able to act that way, the deeper those true feelings sink. They actually convince themselves that they are as superior to the rest of the world as they act.

You don't have to imagine Donald Trump in front of a criminal court when told he is guilty of something ("You're fired!"). We have (former) Canadian executive--now a British Lord--Conrad Black whose trial is still going on in Chicago as of this writing. The man acts as if he can't even imagine why anyone think he has done anything wrong.

Bigots are nothing more than bullies that don't want to get their hands dirty. Advocates of political correctness, for the most part, are bigots with polished shoes and expensive hairdos. They act as if they are better than the common rabble because they have convinced themselves they are. Their act covers their insecurities, their fears.

The last thing these people could do is what Wilfred Peterson advised, to love themselves. Mostly they love money or power, or both. Secretly they hate themselves, though they would never admit this, even to their therapists.

Now you know those hubris-filled arrogant windbags that act superior deep down believe that they must never allow themselves to have their china faces crack or they will reveal their core of slimy mush.

Feel better? I do now that I have that out. But I need to rinse out my mouth to get the bad taste out. I'd rather think about pleasant people who love themselves.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to give children the knowledge and skills they need so that they don't turn to anti-social activities and behaviour in reaction to their ignorance and unfulfilled needs.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Making Your Dreams Into Reality

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We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.
- Martin Luther King

Mr. King was not just an inspired speaker, he was inspiring in his use of the language. Disappointment we can expect, he said, but we must strive to always have hope.
Hope is one of the most inspiring words we have. It makes people feel good. However, it does very little except that.

When you have hope, you know what you want of life. Even if it seems to be out of reach, you have an objective in mind. That's the first and most important step in any change you can make in your life. You need to know where you want to go, what you want to accomplish, who you want to be before you can put into place any changes that might help you to get there.

Hope alone won't do it. Hope is the end of the line for lazy people and those who are frightened to make changes in their lives.

Hope accomplishes nothing except to give us a temporary boost of dopamine into our brain to make us feel good. Actually implementing the changes necessary to achieve the goals of our hope takes a great deal of commitment, a lot of hard work, determination to get through the rough patches that inevitably arise and persistence in ensuring that we become the person we want to be.

That last part may have surprised you if you expected me to say "where you want to be." The change happens first within your own mind, not where you body is located. You must live the role you want to play in your new life before it becomes a reality.

If you want to live in a better place than you do now, you must prepare. The new location may have no reliable source of income for you (a common characteristic of places that are healthier, friendlier and safer to live). You may have to rethink what you can do to earn a living. That may require new skills, some study at a college, joining some groups of people who have as hobbies what you want to do for a living and getting to know what life is really like where you aspire to live.

There will be sacrifices to make if you want change. You can't expect a new community to bend around you to accommodate someone who doesn't want to learn anything new or to do anything differently.

A change of lifestyle means a change of life. First that means some learning. Then the big decision and the commitment to never look back.

Will you have to sacrifice your family and friends? Maybe. People who moved to the New World in the Americas did that, believing that their new life would offer them more than the one they chose to leave behind. But today the internet and a headset allows you to speak to anyone, almost anywhere on the planet, for nothing or almost nothing, every day if you want. Likely more often than you speak on the phone now to those people.

A web cam lets you transmit pictures of yourself speaking and another allows you to see the person you are speaking to in realtime (as each of you speaks).

If you can get along without the hugs of the people you leave behind, at least for most of the time, you can find a better place where you can have new friends that will hug you even more. And actually care for you. People who will be happy to stop and chat with you on the street, who will help you with a flat tire or to find yourself a dentist.

Does it sound as if I am being very specific about something? That's because my wife and I have just been through this process. In a few months we will activate our plan and move to what we believe is the best possible place in the world for us to live. I have been through the process. I lived the dream. I acted on it to make it happen.

Where will we move? I won't tell you that. It's our dream. Find your own dream and make it happen.

Be prepared to work hard to make it happen. Be prepared to cut a few ties to make even better ones happen.

If you have the hope and the determination, you have the ability within you.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to make big changes happen by making small manageable changes one at a time. Think big, act on a small scale.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

From Frankenstein To Our Children

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I am malicious because I am miserable. ... If any being felt emotions of benevolence towards me, I should return them a hundred and a hundred fold(words of Frankenstein "monster").
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author (1797-1851)

People are miserable. Some can be malicious. Perhaps fewer are malicious or miserable today than in Mary Shelley's day, but we still encounter lots of them if we meet many people over a period of time.

I think of Dr. Frankenstein and his creation as two sides of the personalities of everyone. In other words, Dr. Frankenstein and his monster are metaphors for ourselves, much like Jekyll and Hyde of another story. We each have the potential to be creative on the one hand and destructive and malicious on the other.

While we may think of the Frankenstein story as early science fiction, the concept of doctors assembling body parts into whole beings in their dark cellars during the night was not beyond the imagination of the people of Mary Shelley's time. Medical researchers were known to hire impoverished labourers to bring poor people who died "anonymously" to them for dissection as study subjects for anatomy purposes.

In those days the components of the human body that could not be seen and what each did were mysteries known to very few, including medical "professionals" who were more like snake oil salesmen than healers. In turn, stories of what research went on in hidden places after dark abounded, though few had any real knowledge of what was taking place because it was illegal, thus kept secret.

Today we have a much clearer idea of what happens in research facilities, don't we? No, of course we don't. Most of us would shake in horror if we knew the number of animals that die in captivity, undergoing all the non-human experiments that take place for years before apparently good versions of new drugs hit the market.

We trust that researchers may be assembling living creatures using genetic material, but not by sewing together body parts spirited away from graveyards at night to make monsters. The monsters exist among us, nonetheless, in more conventional forms.

We have unprecedented numbers of road rage, office rage, murder, use of illegal drugs, alcoholism, physical abuse and other nasty social problems we prefer to avoid thinking about. At any given time of any day or night, someone in every large city commits an atrocity befitting that of Frankenstein's monster. While the numbers of these incidents in rural areas are naturally lower, the rates in proportion to the population are often higher than in cities.

We live in much more peaceful environments today, in general, than our ancestors. Only a few problems are worse than in their day. However, the ones that are worse seem to have no cure, other than to catch the perpetrators and put them into prison.

As societies, we have yet to mature to the point where we believe that growing people who do not feel the need to commit social abuses is better than allowing them to develop unprepared for the rigours of today's world and imprisoning them after the fact.

We only need to turn our attention to our children to see how social problems develop. Today we have fewer couples in the western world who choose to have children and more who have pets they treat as children. Oddly, the pets are better protected from abuse by the law than are children. Perhaps not so oddly, many parents see their roles as modellers of the next generation as similar to the roles pet owners play with their animals.

We have schools and books and web sites galore to explain to eager pet owners what they should be doing to provide the best living environments for their animals. While we have as many books and web sites for parents, we have many more children than pets and most parents are blissfully unaware of the information available to help them.

Children are not little dolls that we should keep "as innocent as possible for as long as possible." The whole purpose of human children having a long period of development intellectually, physically, socially and emotionally is that they need guidance for 20 years or so to prepare them for adulthood. It's a steep enough learning curve under the best of circumstances. Nature provided for that.
Children learn every waking hour of their lives. If they are not provided with a stimulating and fruitful learning environment for long periods of time, they act the way pets do when they are ignored for too long. They misbehave.

This may be a shocking revelation for many parents, but here it is: no child wants to misbehave. They misbehave as their way of showing us that we have not done our jobs of guiding them and providing what they need.

Some parents say "Oh, he's only crying (or screaming) to get attention." Their response to that is to ignore the expression the child has given of his need for attention. That may be the stupidest thing a person can do.

We have a basic need for touch, for example. It's an enormous need, almost as important as the need for food and shelter. Kids who don't get hugged or touched in a loving way enough grow up to have problems. Lack of knowledge about the need for touch is just the start.

We train doctors, lawyers and other professionals for many years to become competent at what we ask them to do. Parenting, a far more critical human task than that of any professional, gets zero training. All two people need is to have sex. We teach kids that on television.

I have yet to see a soap opera that teaches good parenting skills. They don't even teach good relationship skills and that's what soap operas are about. A few of the more popular situation comedies have demonstrated good parenting skills in recent years. We need more.

We have good programs about parenting on specialty channels, but few watch them. We need to have real life situation programs on television and in movies that show not how to kill the bad guys or to put them in prison, but how to grow kids who don't need either. As television writers have proven (Seinfelt above all), writers can write good programs with lots of humour while covering whatever subject (or nothing, in the case of Seinfelt) they want to discuss.

Have you ever wondered why you were born, what your purpose is in life? If you are a parent and you do it poorly, then you miss your most important purpose. Every living being looks after its young. Almost every one does it better, in general, than us humans. The most important function of every living thing is to raise new generations of its own kind to succeed in a rough world.

Let's turn our attention to young children and see more than little laughing, screaming, pooping dolls. Every parent needs to know much more than we are teaching them. We shouldn't need to live to be grandparents to learn what we needed to know to be good parents.

Please speak up. Our children need your voice.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about what children need and a plan for how to teach parents and teachers how to provide for those needs.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Oh, God, We're Screwed!

A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.
- Robert Quillen, journalist and cartoonist (1887-1948)

What if Quillen is right? What if the only way to have a lasting marriage is to forgive everything your partner does that offends you?

Ah, but the problem today isn't quite that simple. In the past people who got married usually had similar goals in life, similar expectations of each other and of their neighbours, and the belief that (come what may) when the rough times came they had to work through their problems together or die trying.

Today we have people getting married or living common law who have no intention of having a family, children who would carry on their name, their values and their memories into succeeding generations. Marriage vows should be changed from "Til death us do part" to "Until we get tired of each other, take different directions in our lives, can't stand each other or can't figure out how to solve the problems we created."

People get married who have no idea what each other's goals in life are, have little idea of what is important to their mate, have limited skills with which to cope with the vagaries that face every couple over the years and certainly don't want to have to tolerate the "bad times" that used to be referred to in the marriage vows of old.

More and more choose to avoid having children. Others go ahead with having kids because they realize that we have to continue the species and reproduction is the only way. Having made that decision, they begin child rearing using the trial and error, hunt and peck, method. They have little idea what children need, when they need it and how children develop in various ways.

They grow. They learn to walk and talk. We give them lots of toys. They learn to read (somehow). They go to school or nursery school and we dump the job of really raising the kids on the teachers and caregivers there.

Intellectual development they understand. Physical development too. Social and emotional development--if they aren't keeping pace with the other two the others slow down and the kids get into trouble--they know nothing about. Many even lack knowledge of the basic needs of kids other than food, clothing, shelter and toys.

One of the key reasons why marriages fall apart today is that the parents have no idea of what is involved with parenting or child development. In the past people had neighbours they went to church with, worked with, chatted with in the stores and visited with at parties and other social occasions to act as advisers and to provide some adult lessons to the children themselves. Today most of those social ties of old are gone. Kids learn by watching adults around them.

Life and marriage in the western world today are more like business arrangements than emotional commitment. If you don't like it, change it.

Now don't misunderstand. If people have problems, change is needed. However, without the skills to negotiate their way through their troubled times, many people simply resort to separation and divorce as the only route they understand for change. Subsequently, many of the now-single parents live in poverty because they can't afford to support two households.

I don't believe that so many people divorce because they want to live in poverty, or alone, or with someone else they eventually can't get along with. They just don't have the skills or resources to work their way through their problems. They "drift apart" because they haven't bothered to find out what direction their mate was headed. They have no idea how to get back on the same track.

Maybe they're too busy with work. Or with watching television. Or with using their computer. Or with an addiction they turned to when nothing else gave them any relief from their misery and anxiety.

Ask most young parents today what their objectives are for their children and the two most likely answers are "I want them to be happy" and "I want them to have good jobs." Schools teach kids how to get the jobs. No one teaches them how to be happy. What the kids learn is how to make money. Making money becomes the life objective for many of them because they don't have any other they have been taught.

"Taught," there's the key. Parenting is about raising a child to become a competent and confident adult, no matter what occupation they may choose. Schools teach skills necessary for the job. Neither the kids nor the parents can be happy if neither knows what happiness really is. Going to Disney World? Shopping? Smoking pot? Racing around the natural world, destroying it in machines that do nothing but relieve the needs of the drivers for a feeling of power, of being in control?
I'm not about to provide answers here. To provide answers, someone must have asked the questions first. Someone needs to care that things are very wrong and we are doing little about it other than train therapists, hire police and build prisons.

No one is asking because we have all been taught to believe that we should be happy with our fine incomes, our big homes (twice as big as 50 years ago according to a recent study), our carbon monoxide-chugging SUVs and our $200 runners.

We have been trained, by industry, by television and by our schools, to be stupid. To be followers who never ask questions. To be consumers. To raise more consumers. And to never question why we never learned the skills of life.

We can't change anything until enough people accept that something is wrong and speak up to their friends and social groups about it.

Are we afraid of being ostracized by the majority of establishment followers? Of course. That's what the establishment has taught us. We fear being different.

But not everyone wants to be a stupid follower. There are others. You may be one of them, I am too. And many people will read this and agree.

Understand that we are all stupid in many ways. We specialize in our jobs so much and work such long hours at them that we know very little about most other subjects. High school dropouts often have a better general knowledge base and understanding of how to work their way through problems than doctors, lawyers, engineers and preachers.

The only way to make anything happen is to work together. That requires us to ask questions so we can learn more.

Okay, let's talk about it and get something started.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to formulate the plan and how to implement it without a revolution or going broke. It's amazingly cheap. And people know about it around the world. Catch up now.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

You Can Make A Difference Easier Than You think

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Deeds, not stones, are the true monuments of the great.
- John L. Motley, American historian and diplomat (1814-1877)

Motley needed to use the word "great" to have his words get noticed. (People used to love that adjective in his time.) That doesn't mean the advice doesn't work for everyone.

People may not read about your great deeds 1000 years from now. Then again, few of us read about the deeds of great people of the past who lived 1000 years ago. None of them had a monument built to them in their lifetime.

When you think about the names of people you do know who lived 1000 years ago or more, those whose lives are recorded in history books, not that many of them were warriors. Most were scholars, thinkers, people who explored with their minds. They were people who looked at the same things as everyone else, but saw something different.

Then they wrote about what they saw or thought. Some of them became famous only after the printing press was invented, centuries after their deaths.

Socrates never committed a word to paper (papyrus) so far as we know. He just taught. He taught his students to think critically, to consider all possible sides to any point of discussion, and to reach conclusions they could support. He also taught them to speak their minds, a practice he followed himself until the Senate invited him to snuff out his own life or they would have to accommodate him themselves.

You don't have to be great in your lifetime to be considered great afterwards. The men who are known today as St. Nicholas and St. Valentine were appreciated by a few of those they helped, but they certainly weren't heroes in their time.

If you don't feel competent to think great thoughts--it doesn't take an expert or scholar, only someone who studies a topic intensely--you can do great deeds. You can help others. Considering how rarely we see people going to great lengths to help others today, a great wealth of people needing help awaits anyone who wants to accept the challenge.

Maybe you won't receive the key to your city or a Medal of Honor, but you will be remembered. People today tell many stories of strangers who paused in their busy lives to help them. When the keys to the city and medals are gone and forgotten, the good deeds get passed along, often for many generations.

The holy men in whose names we celebrate today at Christmas with gifts and feasting and on February 14th never could have imagined how their deeds of help would be remembered through history. They just did them at the time because other people needed a hand with some things they couldn't cope with on their own.

That's not hard. Look around you.

Memory of good deeds you have done will be a greater monument to you through history than anything of stone that anyone might build.

More importantly, the receivers of your good deeds will want to do something good for other people. Maybe without even knowing why.

You will have made a difference.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to make a difference in many lives by teaching children what they need to know before they need it and before they get into trouble because they don't have what they need.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Here's How To Solve Your Problems

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Never make a defense or an apology until you are accused.
- King Charles I, of England

Wasn't Charles beheaded? Maybe he would reconsider this statement and his policy if given the opportunity.

His intention was to avoid bringing attention to something that others may never find out about. Heaven forbid the king (or anyone) should admit making an error or a bad decision before it's absolutely necessary.

It could, so the thinking goes, raise more problems than it might solve to admit to something or to offer a defence for something that no one knows about ahead of time. This policy has been adopted fully by both business and politicians in modern times. Never let them see you blink. Or sweat.

The trouble with this kind of thinking is that it only lasts just so long until the entire system breaks down because too many people are hiding too much information for fear that they will be punished. Does the concept of "hiding too much" ring any bells? If not you haven't been paying attention to the news for the past decade or more.

You may have experienced this yourself, if you have siblings, when something goes wrong as children the first kid who gets to tell his story to mom first is believed while the other(s) almost always get blamed, punished or suffer in some way.

That includes admitting to having done something wrong so that you get to offer an explanation before being caught or before a brother or sister tattles on you. The first one to tell their story to mom usually gets off scot free. No one has a good explanation for this, except that it's human nature.

This "first to tell mom" thing doesn't just work for kids. It works for adults too if they know how to use the method properly.

Politicians about to be charged by police will often confess to something less serious and ask for the understanding of the public and their supporters for having foolishly committed some illegal act. The right sympathy act works so well that some return to the political arena, absolved of their sins, and get themselves re-elected.

Who will be treated more severely, the spouse who confesses an indiscretion to the other spouse and asks forgiveness or the one who is caught red-handed? Neither will turn out well, but one clearly will have less severe consequences.

In the case of a sexual affair, I must wonder why the spouse whose sexual needs have not been satisfied doesn't discuss the problem with the other spouse and turn to a professional, if necessary, to help resolve their problem. Not a hooker, I didn't mean that kind of professional.

Marriage was never intended to be a commitment to sexual abstinence, though that often happens in marriages, often resulting in divorce. Talking or counselling might avoid the whole problem, but people are afraid to admit that they have sexual needs that their partner isn't satisfying. So they look elsewhere and feel hurt--and hurt the other--when they get caught.

The best way to head off a problem of guilt is to avoid committing the guilty act in the first place. Most times the only way to do that is to discuss the problem with the other party. That other party could be a boss, a neighbour, a workmate, a fellow worshipper, another club member, just about anyone.

Talking works. It avoids personal conflicts and hurt feelings as much as it avoids wars. Wars almost always result when the talking stops or when one party to a negotiation deceives the other while pretending to discuss peace--as the Japanese did prior to Pearl Harbor.

Some people say that compromise is a form of losing. Those people experience many conflicts. They are the people who start wars.

Compromise, usually called negotiation, is a form of peacemaking. Anyone who equates making peace with losing is severely emotionally underdeveloped.

Peace never comes to those who will not talk about the problem. Peace never comes to those who do not understand the problem. Not understanding the full extent of a problem often happens to those who will not discuss it with the others involved because they only know one side of the problem, their own. Every problem has more than one side, more than way of assessing the "facts."

Peace, be it personal or at the international level, isn't a difficult concept to achieve. However, it does require the use of words. And thought, tolerance and understanding. It also requires a level of strength as wimps seldom get what they want. Even wimps can learn strength through discussion.

The first step to solving a major problem is to admit that the two (or more) parties have the problem. When that part if out in the open, the biggest step toward solution has been taken.

Then keep talking about it until everyone agrees to a solution. Remember, juries don't come out of their seclusion having beaten each other up and they rarely come out without a unanimous decision.

Talking works. It's for people with hearts.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to teach important concepts like peace, good, right and wrong to children.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

I Did The Impossible! So there

Do just once what others say you can't do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again.
- James R. Cook

That's not to say that people will stop telling you that you can't do things. They won't stop. However, what they really mean when they tell you that you can't do something is usually that they can't imagine themselves doing whatever it is. The limitations they accept for themselves become those they want to impose on others.

The most common form of limitation that people try to impose on others is "You're too stupid to do that." Quite apart from the fact that such a put-down is a power killer comment used by people who want to control another person, it's dreadfully and egregiously wrong.

While some things that people want to do may be physically impossible, or impossible at this time due to the fact that they depend on technology that doesn't exist now, most things that people tell others they are too stupid to do, they aren't.

In the first six years of our lives we develop certain brain patterns, neuronal pathways we use repeatedly to do both the regular activities we participate in each day and those exceptional ones we find ourselves in occasionally. That is, we learn not just how to brush our teeth, but certain skills that come in handy when we play Hide-n-Seek or learn to use a computer.

For the next five years, roughly until age eleven, we continue to have extraordinary learning ability for certain things, such as language. Learning a new language after age 11 comes with greater difficulty and the refinements of speech pronunciation may be mastered by very few over the age of 11 years.

So it is that by the latter years of grade school some teachers and parents have pretty well given up on some children who seem incapable of doing some tasks that others have learned easily by that time. Since children depend on their parents and teachers to such a huge degree for more years than that (even teenagers claim that their most important source of information is their parents, according to studies conducted in Canada in 1991 and 2001), kids often give up on themselves because they accept the judgments of those who teach them.

I had the extraordinary disadvantage/advantage of having been taught almost nothing by my parents before I began school at age six. Consequently, my cognitive abilities were severely impaired and underdeveloped compared to those of my peers. My physical, social and emotional development were hugely underdeveloped as well due to extreme isolation, but that's another story. I couldn't read when my classmates learned in the primary grades.

I could barely recognize a few hundred words by seventh grade when I took an IQ test with my classmates. I completed less than half the test (I couldn't read most of the questions) but did very well on what I had completed. My teacher and the school administration labelled me lazy because I had not finished the test. That label followed me through high school and appeared on reports and in oral discussions with my parents until I left high school. It never occurred to anyone that I couldn't read.

I gained marvellously useful survival skills with schoolwork, such that I graduated from a three year college course and subsequently received an undergraduate degree from a university (York) and a graduate degree (M.Ed from Toronto) while still being effectively functionally illiterate. I never read a prescribed text, never even bought one. I couldn't read them. I could, however, read enough of snippets from library books to find text to quote for papers and I thought through the subject matter to compose the rest.

Only in my early forties did I force myself to learn to read. A decade later I figured out that I needed to be able to write as well. That took many years, as it does for everyone who writes well.

The point is that I was a functionally illiterate adult who could neither read nor write much before the age of 45. Could I survive in the real world? Yes, it would seem. My entire teaching career with grade school children took place before I reached age 45. Almost every child who left my class read very well for his or her age. They all liked school.

If this story seems unlikely, it's because you have accepted limitations on people that may not be valid. Maybe on yourself as well.

I wrote a book too, one that has been read today on six continents. It's about a subject that few believe there are solutions for: community problems and personal problems of a social/psychological nature. I wrote it before anyone told me solutions were impossible. Now many people don't know what to do with easy solutions that others don't even know exist.

Neo conservatives told me these problems are natural consequences of an advanced society, that we just need to hire more police and judges, build more prisons and courtrooms, train more psychologists to keep up with the proliferation of law breakers. I find their ignorance shocking, especially as it impedes the progress of humanity.

After writing the first draft of the book, a friend who read the manuscript told me that the plan would never work. Many others had exclaimed about how brilliant and innovative it was. That one naysayer acted as the motivation I needed to spur me to do rewrites, to follow through with changes from editors and other professionals and to complete the work.

In other words, I used the claim of limitations by one person as motivation for me to complete the plan that he said was impossible. I didn't believe him as I might have in the past. I used his doubt as stimulus to prepare an even better book. Resistance is necessary for progress. Nothing slides easily uphill.

Anyone of any age can do anything they want with their mind, if they have the desire, the determination and the belief that they can do it.

And if they ignore others who say they can't do it. Or use the words of the doubters as motivation to make their plan work.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to make the impossible happen. And a plan to implement it around the world. Plus it has guides for parents and teachers.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Overcoming Our Greatest Enemy

Never fear shadows. They simply mean that there's a light somewhere nearby.
- Ruth E. Renkei

The content of this quote is almost a metaphor for the lives of many people. They work long hours because they fear poverty. They eat too much because they fear starvation. They get married because they fear being alone. On balance it doesn't make sense, but fear never does.

The association of shadows and fear is a good one. The thing about shadows is that they can easily be made to disappear by producing light. Fear can also be made to lessen considerably when we shine a light on it.

We don't necessarily want fear to disappear completely because some degree of caution is necessary to avoid tragedy.

Like many people, I am afraid of heights. However, I have been up the CN Tower in Toronto, the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Empire State Building in New York. When we bought a lakefront cottage with a fireplace, it became necessary to climb onto the roof to clean the chimney. The need to complete that task regularly motivated me up the ladder the first time. Subsequently it became easier and I don't think about it today.

I had to clean out the eaves troughs (gutters) in our two story house, which meant climbing over 20 feet to reach them. My ladder was a bit too short, being only 20 feet itself, but I thought I could get close enough to reach over the eves and remove the leaf litter. The farther I got up that ladder, the more my heart began to jump around in my chest.

A neighbour suggested that I might want to use his longer ladder so I could get up beside the eves troughs. Not wanting to reveal my fear of heights to him, I borrowed his ladder and found that I could get up high enough to do the job. Not only was I motivated to do the messy cleaning job, but it turned out that my problem was not heights so much as my claustrophobia kicking in as I climbed closer to the wall using my own ladder.

While I was thinking about my fear of heights, I couldn't climb high enough. When I thought about a necessary cleaning job, I had motivation. When I realized that it was claustrophobia, not fear of heights, that held me back at first, I was able to climb where I needed to go. Eliminating the claustrophobia as a factor, the job became easier.

I don't have a problem with elevators and I could remain quiet in a small closet for hours if someone were searching the house to separate me from my life. In each case, I shine a light on that shadow of fear (claustrophobia) by finding a motivator to focus on instead of my fear.

When we focus on fear, on the shadows, all we see are the shadows. We empower our own fear by giving it our attention. If we look for the light or turn on a light ourselves, the shadows disappear, or at least lessen greatly.

There is nothing pretty about fear in any form. However, it helps to remember that fear is entirely imposed on ourselves by ourselves. Rarely (except in movies and at theme parks) is fear imposed on us. Even in movies and at theme parks we choose to frighten ourselves. Real fear is like burying ourselves alive.

Fear not only reduces our ability to enjoy life, it's harmful to life. We can only stand epinephrine (aka Adrenalin) rushing through our bodies as we experience fear just so long until our immune system is compromised. That's like making ourselves open to attack from then-lethal microbes. If our immune system is compromised, we have little protection or defences against germs that could destroy us.

Fear is learned. We often don't know where or how we adopted a particular kind of fear. But because it's learned, it can be unlearned. We usually learn fears as children. Unlearning of those same fears often must take place when we are adults. Learning of any kind is harder for adults, so unlearning fear (a different kind of learning) is harder than learning it in the first place. But it can be done.

The first step is to shine a light on the shadow that is our fear. Whatever the fear is, we need to admit it to ourselves, and maybe to others if they matter. Deciding to eliminate the fear is the first step. Following through with the decision is the hardest part.

We wouldn't accept being imprisoned by a spouse, a parent, a neighbour or a stranger. That would be inhumane, a violation of our basic human rights. But fear has us imprisoning ourselves. We need to be as determined and as vigilant about freeing ourselves from our adopted fear as we would be about freeing ourselves from imprisonment by another person.

Say to yourself "I am not afraid of ....... I can do this. I am taking control of myself. I am the boss of myself." Repeat it until it becomes a part of your being, an integral part of your life. Especially say it when you don't have occasion to be afraid of whatever it is. Only when the occasion is not upon you will you be able to adopt the new way of thinking and acting. And only when you repeat the message many times over many days.

Repeat it a few times before you do what you must, what you were formerly afraid to do. Be sure you have motivation for doing it first. You can think about your motivator as you do whatever caused you fear before. Focus on it.

Do it. Then be proud of yourself. You have overcome the most powerful enemy you will ever have.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to master your own life and help others with their own. Most importantly, it's about how to help children grow into well balanced, competent, confident and unafraid adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Greatness: It's Not About Killing Any More

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Those who occupy their minds with small matters, generally become incapable of greatness.
- Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Let's begin with the declaration that most people have no idea what greatness is in reference to people. They accept what they have been told by others, usually by the media or history books, and embrace it as their own.

Alexander of Macedonia, son of Philip of Macedonia, is known as Alexander The Great because he conquered the known world of his time. He conquered Egypt, Greece and Persia, then crapped out when he reached India and died shortly thereafter. (Nothing west of Greece was important to the world in his time, apparently.) He is known as Alexander The Great, so he must be great. "Everyone" says so, right?

What made Alexander great? Military victory. Julius Caesar is known as a great man because he conquered Gaul and defeated the fractious leaders of Rome to take control himself. Sir Winston Churchill was great because he led Great Britain through the darkest days of the Second World War, encouraging the British people to hold on until the Americans arrived to provide substance to a swindling Allied military.

Virtually all of the people known as great men of the western world were successful military leaders. Even Napoleon Bonaparte, who lost control as often as he gained it, is usually considered great because he led his followers to victory after victory until he became emperor of France.

Very few women of history have earned the accolade of greatness because few engaged in war until recently. Joan of Arc came closest, but she died at age 19 so she didn't have time to win many wars.

Was Socrates great? The Ancient Athenian philosopher, teacher of Plato and Xenophon (470-399 BC), never committed a word to paper (or papyrus) so far as we know. If it hadn't been for Plato we would know nothing about Socrates (nor about Atlantis, but that's another story). Was the first great philosopher a great man, or just great within his particular field?

How about Marie Curie, who won two Nobel Prizes, or Jonas Salk, who created the vaccine against polio?

We have trouble with the concept of greatness in terms of people today because the world is in a state of transition. Before the middle of the 20th century, what was considered most important in the world--thus what was recorded in history books and taught in history classes--was military strength and victory.

After the Suez crisis in 1954, when the world learned that war could be avoided through planning and negotiation (thanks to Canadian Lester Pearson, another Nobel winner), we lost our taste for war as the primary answer to everything. True, wars and genocides have continued since that time, but they happen less frequently now and they are generally frowned upon by the world community. Nations that continue to identify themselves with war are considered brutal or bullies these days in international forums.

Without success in battle, we aren't certain what we should use to measure greatness. We look to movie stars, chess champions, medical wunderkinds and the like, but we have yet to establish new definitions for greatness, for who should be our heroes.

It's harder than ever to be a hero these days. The faults and follies of Paris Hilton are as well known as whatever she does right (I haven't figured that out yet), whereas the public learned mostly of the successes of Marilyn Monroe and little of her problems.

Heroes and great people today must be categorized in terms of their relationship to their particular fields of endeavour. Without rising to international fame, a field-related hero doesn't have to endure close examination by the media. In other words, we care about the successes of Stephen Hawking the theoretical physicist, but not about any penchant he may have for unseemly behaviour.

We don't really have fewer heroes and great people today than in the past. Indeed, we have many more than ever before. We may not recognize them because they are no longer military leaders or emperors.

Today's heroes and great people may be more real than in the past because we recognize them for more than just the ability to kill more people than their enemies. They may be great athletes or great thinkers or doers of great charitable deeds. They may fight battles, but they are battles of words, and for reputation.

That's human progress of a kind we haven't seen before in our history.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to advance human progress in many ways other than through war. It's a plan that works.
Learn more at http://billallin.com