Alan Fox

I’ve recently been reading The Empire of Pain, The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.  This family owned and marketed Oxycontin,   even after its harmful and addictive properties were well known.  The Sackler family was also philanthropic. They donated millions upon millions of dollars to artistic, academic, medical and cultural programs, and their name was on many prestigious art galleries throughout the world.

The book offers one interesting reason, among others, for their apparent generosity.  A quest for immortality.  While they might have been creating an Empire of Pain, they wanted to be known for having done extraordinarily good for the world.

Sorry, Sacklers.  There is no such thing as immortality here on earth.  Though it seems your legacy might be a little different than you had planned, five hundred years from now I doubt anyone will know your story.  And even if they did, it would make no difference to you at all.

We should have no illusions here.  Who were your ancestors and where were they living in 1623 (the year Shakespeare’s First Folio was published – seven years after his death)?  With the help of genealogy, you might trace your family tree back several centuries, but even that wouldn’t reveal anything about who they really were.  How they earned a living.  What they were really like.

Even Shakespeare, who left a legacy of more than thirty plays and hundreds of sonnets and has been called the greatest writer in the English language is not immortal.  We all know his name, most of us have read at least one of his plays and can recite one or two lines from memory (“To be or not to be, that is the question…”).  But even if school children throughout the world pledged allegiance to Shakespeare every morning, what good would it do him?  It’s not as if today he is enjoying his fame.

This leads me to an inescapable conclusion – enjoy each moment.  And if aiming for immortality is important to you, then by all means go for it.  But I suggest you employ acts of actual kindness.  If you change one other person’s life for the better, you have created an enduring legacy.

Recently I read one author’s suggestions for a happy life.  His fifth and final idea was to enjoy each moment as it comes. I remind myself of that regularly.

It seems to me that if we help others and savor each moment, our lives will be both happy and meaningful.

Alan

Reading.  It’s an activity most of us engage in every day.

I remember being in a car when I was seven as my mom was driving us somewhere.  “Mom, reading is really tiring,” I told her.

She looked at me quizzically.

“Now that I can read, I have to read all of the signs.  And there are so many.”

Mom just smiled.

As I’ve said before, I have a short attention span and I like to be efficient.  That means I finish tasks quickly so that I can move on to the next challenge.  A few of my speed-thinking habits are:

1. Skip it.  This is my best one, and it’s extremely effective.  I typically read the L.A. Times from beginning to end every day, but I skip the stories that don’t interest me.  The best way to save time on a task is not to do it at all.
2. Delegate.  For tasks you want to avoid, find someone else who likes doing it, or whom you can pay to do it, or with whom you can exchange services.  I’ll bet you can find a way to avoid doing many of the tasks you don’t like.  Unless you still live at home with your parents.
3. Stop worrying.  I used to go to sleep every night worrying about tomorrow’s problems.  I finally realized that if I can’t do anything to solve the problem in the moment, there is no reason for me to think about it further.
4. Stick it in you Sub.  Your subconscious, that is.  This is a technique I described in People Tools.  I ask my subconscious to figure it out. It might take my subconscious a little time to come through with a solution, but it is usually very effective.

As far as we know, we each have only one trip through this Disneyland of life.  Let’s enjoy as many rides as we can.  And no, you don’t have to read all the signs!

Enough said.

Alan

The Hollywood Bowl is 100 years old.  I’m 82, and the concert I attended at the Bowl last week featured Diana Ross, who is 78.  I felt right at home.

My father was a professional French horn player. I remember attending concerts at the Bowl in the mid 1940’s when he played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Diana Ross was the lead singer of the Supremes in the 60’s. At the pinnacle of their success, Berry Gordy, the president of Motown, renamed the group, “Diana Ross and the Supremes.” In 1970, Diana left the group to start her solo career, and they went back to being called The Supremes. At the Hollywood Bowl, Diana was supreme all by herself.  I enjoyed the concert.

Of particular interest to me were the technical aspects of the performance. Usually, a performance of that caliber is technically seamless, but that night there were glitches.

At one point Diana asked to have the stage lights turned down.  Nothing happened.  That was the canary in the coal mine.

Half an hour into the show it was apparent that Diana was having trouble hearing the band.  As with many onstage performers she was relying on earbuds, or some other kind of hearing device. She mentioned she was having a problem twice. But no one appeared on stage to help her out.  She seemed to be able to synchronize her singing with the band just fine but it was clear to me from her demeaner that she was not happy.

The problem with having to perform for the public at that level was aptly summarized by the Russian composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff, who said, “If I don’t practice for one day, I know it.  If I don’t practice for two days, my students know it.  If I don’t practice for three days, everyone knows it.”  He didn’t even mention “technical difficulties.”

Despite the technical difficulties, however, Diana remained entirely professional.  But at the end of the concert, in the middle of a song, she left the stage. The song continued, and we heard her singing, but she never returned.  She didn’t even take a bow.  When the song ended, the lights came up.  That was strange.

Well, Diana, at least you solved one technical difficulty.  You live nearby, so you probably arrived home before I even drove my car out of the parking lot.

Alan