I couldn’t put this book down. Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life, should be required reading for anybody wanting to live a meaningful life. I can’t remember the last time I cried while reading a book. This could have more to do with the types of books I read, but A Million Miles moved me. Deeply.

The book is about looking at life—my life—as a story. What makes a good story? What stories do people want to be a part of? What stories do we ignore? What stories are worth living?

My highlights from A Million Miles:

“But nobody really remembers easy stories. Characters have to face their greatest fears with courage. That’s what makes a story good. If you think about the stories you like most, they probably have lots of conflict. There is probably death at stake, inner death or actual death, you know. These polar charges, these happy and sad things in life, are like colors God uses to draw the world.”

“When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.”

“If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.”

“A character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it is the basic structure of a good story.”

“The point of life is character transformation.”

“The idea that a character is what he does remains the hardest to actually live.”

“A general rule in creating stories is that characters don’t want to change. They must be forced to change.”

“Robert McKee says humans naturally seek comfort and stability. Without an inciting incident that disrupts their comfort, they won’t enter into a story. They have to get fired from their job or be forced to sign up for a marathon. A ring has to be purchased. A home has to be sold. The character has to jump into the story, into the discomfort and the fear, otherwise the story will never happen.”

“It made me wonder if the reasons our lives seem so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want.”

“‘Why would the Incas make people take the long route?’ my friend from Alabama asked. ‘Because the emperor knew,’ Carlos said, ‘the more painful the journey to Machu Picchu, the more the traveler would appreciate the city, once he got there.’”

A story goes to the next level with two key elements, and both of them have to do with the ambition of the character. First, he said, is the thing a character wants must be very difficult to attain. The more difficult, the better the story. The reason the story is better when the ambition is difficult, Steve said, is because there is more risk, and more risk makes the story question more interesting to an audience. The greatest stories, Steve told me, are the ones in which the character’s very life is at stake. There needs to be a question as to whether the character will make it, whether he will defeat the enemy or the enemy will defeat him. The second element that makes a story epic, he said, was the ambition had to be sacrificial. The protagonist has to be going through pain, risking his very life, for the sake of somebody else. “Those stories are gold,” Steve said. “You can ask people to name their favorite movies, and those two elements will be in almost all of them.”

“And if your friends are living boring stories, you probably will too.”

“The truth is, we are all living out the character of the roles we have played in our stories.”

“I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can’t see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story.”

“’Writing a story isn’t about making your peaceful fantasies come true. The whole point of the story is the character arc. You didn’t think joy could change a person, did you? Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it’s conflict that changes a person.’ His voice was like thunder now. ‘You put your characters through hell. You put them through hell. That’s the only way we change.’”

“But Victor Frankl whispered in my ear all the same. He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.”

“I’ve let go of the idea that this life has a climax.”

“It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.”

The big bad evil corporations are the villains and the small mom-and-pop farms are the heroes. The story of David and Goliath never gets old. Here’s the marketing copy from the film’s website:

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

If you don’t care where your food comes from, what it’s doing to your body or why any of this matters to the future of humanity, I don’t suggest wasting your time on this movie.

Although Jamaica and I didn’t quite convert to full vegetarianism, we have been modifying our diet quite substantially.

Fortunately, one of my favorite restaurants is on the same page with this conversation. They call it “food with integrity.”

This book is as enlightening as it is lethal. Understanding the “psychology of compliance” will bring greater awareness to your own vulnerabilities, but it is even more tempting to use the principles of Influence to leverage the vulnerabilities of others. “The evidence suggests that the ever-accelerating pace and informational crush of modern life will make this particular form of unthinking compliance more and more prevalent in the future.”

Cialdini details six “weapons of influence.” (Note: Wikipedia has a nice breakdown of these as well.)

Reciprocation: Give people something and they’ll feel like they owe you
“People we might ordinarily dislike—unsavory or unwelcome sales operators, disagreeable acquaintances, representatives of strange or unpopular organizations—can greatly increase the chance that we will do what they wish merely by providing us with a small favor prior to their requests.”

“Although the obligation to repay constitutes the essence of the reciprocity rule, it is the obligation to receive that makes the rule so easy to exploit. The obligation to receive reduces our ability to choose whom we wish to be indebted to and puts that power in the hands of others.”

“Suppose you want me to agree to a certain request. One way to increase your chances would be first to make a larger request of me, one that I will most likely turn down. Then, after I have refused, you would make the smaller request that you were really interested in all along.”

Commitment and Consistency: Get people to commit and they generally follow through
“The tactic of starting with a little request in order to gain eventual compliance with related larger requests has a name: the foot-in-the-door technique.”

“And once you’ve got a man’s self-image where you want it, he should comply naturally with a whole range of your requests that are consistent with this view of himself.”

“The purpose behind the testimonial contests [when companies ask you to say something nice about their product] is the same as the purpose behind the political essay contests of the Chinese Communists. In both instances, the aim is to get as many people as possible to go on record as liking the product.”

“And the evidence is clear that the more effort that goes into a commitment, the greater is its ability to influence the attitudes of the person who made it.”

Social Proof: People do things when others are doing it too
“The principle of social proof. It states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct.”

“Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures.”

“We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.”

“The principle of social proof says so: The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more the idea will be correct.”

“All things being equal, you root for your own sex, your own culture, your own locality…and what you want to prove is that you are better than the other person. Whomever you root for represents you; and when he wins, you win.”

Authority: People generally respond to perceived authority
“A multilayered and widely accepted system of authority confers an immense advantage upon a society. It allows the development of sophisticated structures for resource production, trade, defense, expansion, and social control that would otherwise be impossible.”

Liking: People like what other people like

Scarcity: Perceived scarcity often generates demand
“Like the other weapons of influence, the scarcity principle trades on our weakness for shortcuts.”

“This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position can get us to agree with that position by arranging to have their message restricted.”

“We can see that information may not have to be censored for us to value it more; it need only be scarce.

“The drop from abundance to scarcity produced a decidedly more positive reaction to the cookies than did constant scarcity.”

“The feeling of being in competition for scarce resources has powerfully motivating properties.”

“The joy is not in experiencing a scarce commodity but in possessing it. It is important that we not confuse the two.”

Kalman is a great painter and the story she tells through her art is very engaging. I was particularly interested in how Franklin spent a day, with a page right out of his day planner.

Kalman’s style reminds me a little bit of Richard Stine, who also tells great stories through art.

(Link via Daniel Pink)

I can’t believe it took me this long to finally read the late Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Published in 1984, unfortunately, it is still just as relevant today as it was then.

Although loaded with quotes and quips by communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, Postman takes things a step further and argues why television is killing us. “The A-Team and Cheers are no threat to our public health. 60 Minutes, Eye-Witness News and Sesame Street are.”

With an initial nod to Orwell’s 1949 classic Nineteen Eighty-Four and to Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World, Postman believes Huxley got it right when he said that what we love will be our ruin.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

What follows is my feeble attempt to string together personal highlights after immersing myself over several days in this thoughtful book.

It began with the clock…
“And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser.”

“And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.”

…and public discourse went from oral to print…
“The Dunkers came close here to formulating a commandment about religious discourse: Thou shalt not write down thy principles, still less print them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time.”

“Methodist camp meetings combined picnics with opportunities to listen to oratory.”

“What kind of audience was this [who listened to the Lincoln-Douglas Debates]? Who were these people who could so cheerfully accommodate themselves to seven hours of oratory? These were people who regarded such events as essential to their political education.”

“This language is pure print. That the occasion required it to be spoken aloud cannot obscure that fact. And that the audience was able to process it through the ear is remarkable only to people whose culture no longer resonates powerfully with the printed word.”

“Even the sounds of sentences of spoken words are rarely engaging except when composed by those with extraordinary poetic gifts. If a sentence refuses to issue forth a fact, a request, a question, an assertion, an explanation, it is nonsense, a mere grammatical shell.”

…slowly moving from reason and logic to an appeal to our passions…
“In 1786, Benjamin Franklin observed that Americans were so busy reading newspapers and pamphlets that they scarcely had time for books.”

“Lewis Mumford wrote of this shift, ‘the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local; …print made a greater impression than actual events…. To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more shadowy. Learning became book-leaming.’”

“Unlike the principal figures in today’s ‘great awakening’—Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, et al.—yesterday’s leaders of revivalist movements in America were men of learning, faith in reason, and generous expository gifts. Their disputes with the religious establishments were as much about theology and the nature of consciousness as they were about religious inspiration.”

“The differences between the character of discourse in a print-based culture and the character of discourse in a television-based culture are also evident if one looks at the legal system.”

“Indeed, the history of newspaper advertising in America may be considered, all by itself, as a metaphor of the descent of the typographic mind, beginning, as it does, with reason, and ending, as it does, with entertainment.”

“Advertising was, as Stephen Douglas said in another context, intended to appeal to understanding, not to passions.”

“The printed word had a monopoly on both attention and intellect, there being no other means, besides the oral tradition, to have access to public knowledge.”

“This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture.”

“The name I give to that period of time during which the American mind submitted itself to the sovereignty of the printing press is the Age of Exposition.”

…because the more we ‘know’, the greater our inaction becomes…
“[With the telegraph], transportation and communication could be disengaged from each other, that space was not an inevitable constraint on the movement of information.”

“For telegraphy did something that Morse did not foresee when he prophesied that telegraphy would make ‘one neighborhood of the whole country.’”

“The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography’s definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence.”

“The telegraph made information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.”

“Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives.”

“To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.”

…and television is the king of entertaining inaction…
“If television is a continuation of anything, it is of a tradition begun by the telegraph and photograph in the mid-nineteenth century, not by the printing press in the fifteenth.”

“The assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one; that an automobile, for example, is only a fast horse, or an electric light a powerful candle.”

“For these reasons and more television will not have the same meaning or power as it does in America.”

“But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.”

“Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television.”

“Thinking does not play well on television.”

“The single most important fact about television is that people watch it, which is why it is called television.”

“Therefore—and this is the critical point—how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged.”

…meanwhile religion is further marginalized…
“[One example is that] on television, religion, like everything else, is presented, quite simply and without apology, as an entertainment. Everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana.”

“Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.”

“The danger is not that religion has become the content of television shows but that television shows may become the content of religion.”

What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.

…and education is being re-defined…
“Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture (the three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all people, financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation. You pay when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care to watch.”

“John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning.”

“The greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes … may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history…. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.”

“We learn what we do.”

“America is, in fact, the leading case in point of what may be thought of as the third great crisis in Western education.”

“I mean only to say that, like the alphabet or the printing press, television has by its power to control the time, attention and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education.”

“But no one has ever said or implied that significant learning is effectively, durably and truthfully achieved when education is entertainment.”

“Television is a nongraded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other words, in doing away with the idea of sequence and continuity in education, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought itself.”

“There must be nothing that has to be remembered, studied, applied or, worst of all, endured. It is assumed that any information, story or idea can be made immediately accessible, since the contentment, not the growth, of the learner is paramount.”

“The name we may properly give to an education without prerequisites, perplexity and exposition is entertainment.”

“The consequences of this reorientation are to be observed not only in the decline of the potency of the classroom but, paradoxically, in the refashioning of the classroom into a place where both teaching and learning are intended to be vastly amusing activities.”

“The content of the school curriculum is being determined by the character of television, and even worse, that character is apparently not included as part of what is studied.”

…in the end, the joke is on us.
“For America is engaged in the world’s most ambitious experiment to accommodate itself to the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug.”

“For in the end, [Huxley] was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve read a book with this many pages, but at the suggestion of Jim Collins, I just finished reading In Love and War: The Story of a Family’s Ordeal and Sacrifice During the Vietnam Years, by Jim and Sybil Stockdale.

James Stockdale was a navy pilot shot down in 1965 over Vietnam. For seven years he was tortured and held prisoner in Hoa Lo Prison, before being released in 1973.

In Love and War is a first-person account of the Stockdales story. Every other chapter is written by the other spouse, telling the story and struggle from their side of the world. It’s tender and tenacious, violent and victorious.

I was most impressed with Jim Stockdale’s grounded sense of self. As he recalls “a pilgrimage to [his] birthplace,” Jim says, “I figured it was healthy to be reminded of my upbringing and who I was from time to time; I would take all of those qualities I acquired in my boyhood home with me to the grave.”

It was this prevailing sense of self that led another Jim—Jim Collins—to unpack a bit more in his book Good to Great. Collins writes about a conversation he had with Stockdale regarding his coping strategy during his period in the Vietnamese POW camp. Says Stockdale, “I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

When Collins asked who didn’t make it out, Stockdale replied: “Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

Stockdale then added: “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” Witnessing this philosophy of duality, Collins went on to describe it as the Stockdale Paradox.

In contrast to this paradox, Stockdale said in his book that “chance and continual uncertainty are the ultimate destabilizers.”

From innocence to responsibility
“The essence of childhood is innocence. The essence of youth is awareness. The essence of adulthood is responsibility. This book is for people and a Christian community on the threshold of cultural responsibility. What does it mean to be not just culturally aware but culturally responsible? Not just culture consumers or even just culture critics, but culture makers?”

Culture is what we make of the world
“We make sense of the world by making something of the world.” In other words, creating culture is the “activity of making meaning.”

“We don’t make Culture,” says Crouch. “We make omelets. We tell stories. We build hospitals. We pass laws.”

Culture is a shared experience
“Culture making is people (plural) making something of the world–it is never a solitary affair. I hope that most people who read this book will read it together with someone else. One of the most mysterious and beautiful things about culture is that it has to be shared. I hope families will read this book and discover that the family, so seemingly insignificant in an age of technology and celebrity, is still the heart of culture, the primary place where most of us are called to cultivate and create.”

The only way to change culture is to create more of it
“Creativity requires cosmos–it requires an ordered environment.”

“The biggest cultural mistake we can indulge in is to yearn for technological ’solutions’ to our deepest cultural ‘problems.’”

“Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. But culture is not changed simply by thinking.”

Christianity and culture
“How did a movement with a few thousand adherents at most in the first century become half the population of the empire by the fourth century?”

“The answer comes down to culture. In feature after feature of Roman culture, Christians, animated by a powerfully different story from their pagan neighbors, were boldly creative. Their lives simply did not look like their neighbors’. But they were not cut off from their neighbors–the culture they created was public and accessible to all.”

“The church had no magic or medicine to cure the plague, but it turns out that survival even of a terrible disease has a lot to do with one’s access to the most basic elements of life. Simply by providing food, water and friendship to their neighbors, Christians enabled many to remain strong enough that their own immune systems could mount an effective defense.”

“Stark believes, the church’s doctrines were ‘the ultimate factor in the rise of Christianity…. Central doctrines of Christianity prompted and sustained attractive, liberating, and effective social relations and organizations.’ In simpler terms, Christian belief was neither just the product of social forces in Roman culture; nor was it a culturally inert ‘private’ matter.”

“Culture, then, is the furniture of heaven. Are we creating and cultivating things that have a chance of furnishing the new Jerusalem?”

To put it most boldly: culture is God’s original plan for humanity–and it is God’s original gift to humanity, both duty and grace. Culture is the scene of humanity’s rebellion against their Creator, the scene of judgment-and it is also the setting of God’s mercy.

What is God doing in culture? What is his vision for the horizons of the possible and the impossible? Who are the poor who are having good news preached to them? Who are the powerful who are called to spend their power alongside the relatively powerless? Where is the impossible becoming possible?

For nearly all of us, becoming a celebrity is completely, categorically impossible. For all of us, becoming a saint is completely, categorically possible. So why are so many trying to become a celebrity and so few trying to become a saint?

We are called to create culture
“Where do you experience grace–divine multiplication that far exceeds your efforts?”

We are called to create culture, says Crouch, “at the intersection of grace and cross.”

Quoting Frederick Buechner, Crouch suggests that “calling is found where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

I’ve since grown up a little.

I’d really like a sabbatical.

Daniel Pink tells of Stefan Sagmeister and the one-year sabbatical that Sagmeister takes every seven years. He makes a lot of sense.

I’ve been in my current “state” for seven years this November. Seems about right. Perhaps if and when I transition from my current role/responsibilities/season?