Easter Island is a speck of land in the South Pacific, about 2,500 miles from either Chile or Tahiti.  I’ve visited there four times, but I won’t be going back.  For good reason.

The last time I was there, the owner of our motel charged me for an extra day, and also for an extra dinner.  I argued the point with him, as I normally would when I feel I’m right.

The argument was not going well.  The man was steadfast in his seemingly flawed reasoning that I owed the extra money.  It was not a small amount.

It was then I realized, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.  In other words, I was in a foreign country where I didn’t know either the people or the local rules.  For all I knew the proprietor was also the chief of police who could detain me on Easter Island indefinitely.  And what would I do then?  Call the President of the United States?

I paid the extra money but promised myself I would never return.

You have to choose your battles in life, the fewer the better, and never those you can’t win.

A friend of mine once had a two-hour argument with U.S. Customs.  The result?  He missed his connecting flight and for the next five years, every time he traveled abroad, he was hassled by a U.S. customs official when he returned.  Perhaps there was a note in his file read by every agent he encountered as he passed through customs upon re-entering the country?

Years ago, when I was practicing law, I needed to obtain default judgements every month or two from a specific court clerk in downtown Los Angeles.  I was always very nice to him, and he promptly provided what I needed.  Just as on Easter Island, I did not have a choice of vendor, so I made sure to maintain a good relationship with the clerk.

We’ve probably all noticed over the years that in dealing with people, especially a stranger, it’s better to start out nice.  You can always shift to a hardline later, but that’s a one-way street.  It’s difficult to switch from nasty to nice.  As they say, you only have one chance to make a favorable first impression.

I have many places yet to visit or revisit.  Alas, Easter Island is not one of them.

Alan

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