One silver lining of coronavirus is that Daveen has been cleaning out the garage. She recently found a draft for a piece that I wrote more than thirty years ago. Had I been writing a blog back then, it would have been an entry. That piece is as follows:

I’m forty-nine.  I have never been comfortable with fast dancing.  Actually, I’m afraid of it.

At a big celebration twelve years ago, one of my adult daughters won the fast dance contest.  I was proud of her.  I didn’t dance at all.

Every year my office holds a holiday dance. Most everyone loves it.  I used to dread it.  There’s a lot more fast dancing than slow (which is easier for me and . . . well, slow dancing can be fun).

Though it’s not a big issue in my life I still don’t like to feel left out three or four evenings a year (counting two or three weddings), as I obsess about my fear of fast-dancing.

Five years ago at our holiday office party Karen asked me to fast dance with her and I reluctantly agreed. She was good.  She was also kind.

“You’re doing great,” she said.  Others agreed.  I almost trusted them.  But I knew I didn’t know what I was doing.

My young daughter Ingrid likes to show off.  This evening, between work and dinner, I flopped down on the sofa and she ran up to me. 

I said, “Are you Ingrid?”

“No.”

“Are you Carol?”

“No.”  Laughter.

“Are you Mommy?”

“No.”  More laughter.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Star Dancer.”  Proudly.

“She wants to dance for you,” her older sister explained.

We turned on the radio.  Ingrid danced.  Fast.  Exuberantly.

How could she?  Ingrid had no dance lessons.  She didn’t know the rules.

Fortunately, she didn’t realize there were rules she had to follow.

So Ingrid left the rules where they often belong – in someone else’s mind.

While I wrote this thirty years ago, I still feel the truth at its core. As an editor of Rattle, I have found that children up to about ten years old often write great poetry.  That’s before they realize they are expected to follow some rules, and their natural creativity goes into hiding.

I’m considering a fast-dance with Daveen tonight.  I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know the rules either.

Alan

As many of you know, in 2014 and 2015 I wrote three self-help books that were published by SelectBooks:  People Tools; People Tools for Business; and People Tools for Love and Relationships.  I’m pleased to say all three books are still selling well on Amazon.

A few weeks ago one of my grandsons visited for several days.  At breakfast he said, “Grandpa, I’m reading three of your people tools chapters every morning, and one of my favorites is “The 80% Solution.”  I was surprised, especially because Daveen had recently told me that one of her favorites is also “The 80% Solution.”

The basic idea of this short chapter from the original People Tools book is that in any relationship, whether business or personal, if someone meets 80% of my ideal then “I will stick with him or her and not spend one second thinking about a replacement.”

There is no particular “magic” to my choice of 80%.  Your yardstick could be 70% or, if you never want to be satisfied with anyone, you could set it at 100%.  My point is that we all have to be satisfied with less than perfection, at least in others. The popular singer Shakira told 60 Minutes she has never been 100% satisfied with any of her performances. Despite those impossibly high expectations for herself, I’m confident that most people in her audience are quite satisfied with a lesser standard.

One of my favorite (and most practical) tools in People Tools for Business is “Wait Three Days.”  Whenever I receive a business email that bothers me, I wait three days before responding.  In the book I share an example of how I made a nice profit on a real estate transaction because, after waiting three days, I was able to respond in a polite and creative way rather than impulsively or with anger.

In People Tools for Love and Relationships the initial and most fundamental chapter is ‘The Key is You.”  I grew up believing that the secret to enjoying a successful relationship was simply to pick the right person.  I was naïve about this, and wrong.  You don’t find the right person.  You have to be the right person. You have to put in the effort to make any relationship work.

As a teenager I read many books and magazine articles about love.  The best advice I ever found was a single sentence. “If you want someone to love you, love them first.”

In all relationships we begin as strangers. The goal is to lower our barriers.  (See the chapter, “Is it Safe?”).  Every couple that celebrates a tenth, or fiftieth, anniversary has learned, to a greater or lesser degree, to get along in a relationship, reduce barriers, and be satisfied with less than 100% of their ideal.

Today I’m tempted to summarize all of my People Tools about relationships with one short statement:  Be appreciative, and be nice.

Alan

I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of efficiency.  For example, whenever I walked anywhere I always took the shortest route I could.  Maybe I was just physically lazy. But now I’ve replaced that habit.

Last year, after I had surgery on my spine, my son, an MD, strongly recommended that I walk briskly for 20 to 30 minutes every day.  “Dad,” he warned, “at your age you have to exercise a least six days a week.”  Ugh.

I felt intimidated.  For most of my life I’ve held the belief that the shortest distance between two points is simply to sit in one place.  After all, I’m going to end up where I started anyway, so why not just stay where I am, or at least combine trips, or, better yet, persuade myself that I really don’t need what I thought I did anyway.

But in deference to my son, and in the interest of good health, I reluctantly began to walk 3,000 steps a day. Before last year, I hadn’t even realized that my iPhone kept track of every step I took.  In 2018 I averaged 2,635 steps a day.  In 2019 my average was 2,229 steps even though, after my surgery, I hardly walked at all for three months.

But I’m delighted to share that in 2020 I’m up to 4,791 steps a day.  Now I make a game of it.  This month I reached a pinnacle of 7,000 steps a day.  That’s about the maximum I can regularly sustain, but I’m optimistic that I will because I feel more energetic than I have in years.

To achieve this goal I’ve developed an entirely new mindset, discarding my tendency towards “efficiency” in favor of “effectiveness.”

Tonight I was waiting for Daveen to join me for dinner. She indicated that she would be ready in five minutes.  Two years ago I would have simply sat at the table.  But instead I took the opportunity to walk three laps (about 400 steps) around my house.  Now I look for opportunities to walk, rather than opportunities to sit.  And whenever I walk somewhere, I don’t take shortcuts because that’s no longer the point. Now I deliberately take “long cuts,” since the point is to gain more exercise.

That isn’t the only change I’ve applied in my life. Years ago my goal at work was to finish every project as quickly as I could. Today I work a little slower and the result is a lot better.

I know that eventually each of us will end up in the dustbin of history. But our lives take meaning from how we live in the moment. Accordingly, it seems that the shortest path to good health is to take a little longer, and the best way to accomplish a task is to work more deliberately.

This is why I now realize that longer is often shorter.

Enjoy your long, or short, week.

Alan