I have a new post up at Wisebread today about how to find cheap wine that you’ll actually enjoy. There are lots of tips out there about which wines to buy and what years are “good.” But what it all should come down to is what you think tastes good.

Forget about what the “experts” say.

The secret is to check out wine tastings. Check out the post for the full scoop! I actually went to my first ever wine tasting a couple of weeks ago and it was a lot of fun.

Image by Christina Snyder

On Monday I posted an interview I did with “Chris,” a married guy in his late thirties with three young girls that lives in a suburb of Detroit. Today I’m talking to someone closer to my own age and my own place in life.

Jim is a lawyer in his mid thirties that just had a baby daughter this year. I was curious to see how he felt about what’s happening to the economy in general and Detroit specifically.

What changes have you noticed around the Detroit area over the past few months as the economy has worsened?

Michigan’s economy has been bad for a few years. We have had high unemployment longer than most states. The rest of the country is now catching up with Michigan. Many people are leaving the state because of the lack of jobs here. Michigan has to reinvent itself from an industrial state to a more technological state. The auto industry has been slow to adapt, they must change the business model they were using.

Do you have friends or acquaintances that have been impacted? If so, how are they dealing with it? Are any of them leaving Detroit?

I have two friends that work for GM. They are both white collar workers. They have had to take pay cuts. They are also both in fear of GM going out of business [they were right]. I have had a friend who works for the State of Michigan as a lawyer, he was told he will have to take 6 unpaid days off this summer. I have had many friends and acquaintances that have moved from Michigan in the past year. Some have moved for the right reasons and some I think have moved just for a change of scenery.

There was a fire in your neighborhood recently and right away there were suspicions of insurance fraud. Are things really that bad?

There are many people who can not afford their houses mortgage payments anymore. There are a number of reasons why they can’t afford the mortgage payments, i.e loss of income, loss of job, loss of business. People do desperate things when they are desperate. It seems when the economy is good crime is down and so are scams. When the economy is bad crime is up and so are scams. I hear new scams to watch out for on a weekly basis.

As someone who just recently started a family, has the situation in Detroit made you nervous about the stability of your family? Would you ever consider leaving?

First, just bringing a baby into this world at this time is very nerve-racking. There is always a lot of stress, but with the economy so down, the stress has increased. I am very nervous about living in this area right now, but I am from the suburbs of Detroit. My family lives here and my wife’s family lives here so I would prefer to stay in Michigan. I have lived in Columbus, Scottsdale, and Chicago. I would move back to Scottsdale or Chicago anytime, I loved my time there.

Let’s play worst-case scenario: you’ve lost your job and are having trouble finding another. What would you do first: get a job in a totally unrelated field or leave Detroit?

Well I have enough savings right now to live for a while without a salary, plus my wife is a teacher so she has a good income. I cooked in college and I am still passionate about it. I would go to any restaurant to pick up some hours and then look for a job. I would first look in the Detroit area, but I would be willing to move if necessary. I used to live in Arizona and really liked living out there.

You are mayor of Detroit. Before your first scandal hits, what do you do to steer the city in the right direction?

The City of Detroit needs so much change, I am not sure it is possible. The first thing to do is to try to get rid of the corruption. The second thing to do is try to bring back business to the city. There is no incentive for a business to open in Detroit today. There is high unemployment, high crime, and citizens who do not do much to change the city. The city has undeveloped areas along the waterfront that need to be developed. There needs to be more police officers on the streets. Companies are moving out of the City of Detroit because the workers they have do not show up on a regular basis or show up late.

Note: One interesting thing I wanted to mention is that Jim is a divorce lawyer and I remember we once joked about how when the economy got tough was helping his business because more people were fighting about money. But now that things are REALLY bad, people can’t even afford to get divorced. They just live in separate rooms and wait it out—it doesn’t make financial sense to get divorced. Romantic, isn’t it?

Image by d herrera96

The recession has his everyone in this country in one way or another. We all know someone that has lost his/her job or is going through tough times financially because of the current credit crisis. But Detroit has been hit hard like no other place in the country. The automotive industry, which has been identified for so long with the city, is falling apart and so are the thousands of jobs so many people relied on for sustenance.

At least that’s what the media says.

I happen to know some people that actually live on the outskirts of Detroit and I wanted to get their perspective on what the city is going through and how they see the future playing out.

First up, we have “Chris.” Chris is in his late 30s, is married with three young girls, and works as an accountant. As an aside, he also plays ice hockey and he will lay you out if you get in his way—I’ve seen it happen.

What changes have you noticed (good or bad) around the Detroit area over the past few months as the economy has worsened?

I honestly haven’t seen much that’s good. I see a lot of “for sale” signs on homes and a lot of “for lease” signs on commercial buildings. I see “sketchy” businesses that one might typically see in depressed areas. Businesses such as pawn shops, pay day loans rent to own, credit repair, short term auto insurance, etc. And they’re popping-up in areas that have historically been considered affluent. I see the closing of high end restaurants as well.

Do you have friends or acquaintances that have been impacted? If so, how are they dealing with it? Are any of them leaving Detroit? Are you seeing any specific industries being impacted more than others?

It has certainly become more common to hear of friends/acquaintances that have lost their jobs or taken buy-outs. I’ve heard some, but not too much, about people leaving the state to take new jobs or to expand their business due to lack of work. The majority of people that lost their jobs that I know still want to make a go of it in Michigan and are still receiving or living off severance payments or buy-out money. But at some point, nobody wants to be the last one here to turn out the lights.

Obviously the automotive industry is getting killed. But it’s not limited to GM, Chrysler, and Ford and their tier 1, 2, and 3 suppliers. It also extends to service industries that cater to the automotive industry such as advertising, professional services business/management consulting, hospitality, and the like. And it obviously trickles down to consumer-related businesses as well such as home builders, and restaurants.

You once mentioned that if things continued to get bad, you would want to get a gun. Were you serious? Are things really going to get that bad?

It probably won’t get that bad, but better safe than sorry. Just kidding—my wife would never allow a gun in our house. But we are thinking of investing in more home security. The pessimist side of me pictures many foreclosed and abandoned homes in our subdivision. I picture squatters or homeless people taking refuge in those houses. I see lots of people with very little to lose. And I want to make sure that my family is safe.

As a father of three, has the situation in Detroit made you nervous about the stability of your family? Have you ever considered leaving?

Not only do I love Michigan and what it has to offer in terms of the natural landscape (lakes, woods, etc.) and the changing of the seasons, but I also like the down-to-earth Midwestern mentality. We are also extremely fortunate to have immediate family within just a few miles of our home. I cannot picture us leaving our family behind (but I’ve been told that they’d just follow us if we left [he's joking here too everyone]). That said, I want my kids to have the best opportunities and I want to live wherever they decide to ultimately raise their families. I wouldn’t be against leaving if we could go somewhere that has a brighter outlook assuming all family went with and assuming we’d still enjoy all four seasons (i.e. not Arizona).

You once mentioned to me when you were shopping for your new car that you knew you wanted to buy American. It stuck in my head quite a bit because I feel like most people these days want a deal regardless of where a car is made. I have a feeling that when things get better, this kind of patriotism will be more and more common. What’s your take on that? Should people buy American today when the car companies may not be around in a few years?

I have always been patriotic but I am also a  believer in capitalism and free markets. I wouldn’t buy American if the quality was significantly worse than foreign manufacturers as that would perpetuate the problem and I’d get a bad deal. But since I live in a state that is dominated by the domestic manufacturers and I believe the quality gap is no longer significant, so I will continue to buy American. As it relates to the risk of bankruptcy and consequently the risk of the automakers not being around to honor warranties, I guess I’m willing to take that risk; for now.

US car makers: should they get bailed out or not? Do they deserve all this help when they got into this mess themselves in the first place?

This is a sore subject for me.  The scrutiny that GM and Chrysler are receiving from the politicians is disproportionate relative to the bailout money received when compared to the size of bailouts provided to other industries (banks and insurance companies) and the scrutiny (or lack thereof) that they receive. I think the politicians are doing this as somewhat of a charade so they can appear hard-nosed against an industry that they think they understand as having a somewhat contained impact if it were to fail. The auto industry helped build America and the middle class.

In hindsight, sure the auto industry was not as cost conscious as it should have been when times were good and competition low, but the government may have even contributed to the problem somewhat as it supported legislation to bolster the unions. It’s the legacy costs associated with the unions that make it difficult for the domestic automakers to compete. There’s so much hypocrisy in this. What about the lucrative benefits and perks that the politicians receive (e.g. defined benefit plans, great health care coverage, etc.)? How can they point fingers at the auto execs for use of private jets when Nancy Pelosi uses one each weekend to fly home at tax payers’ expense? Again, ridiculous.

Let’s play worst-case scenario: you’ve lost your job and are having trouble finding another. What would you do first: get a job in a totally unrelated field or leave Detroit?

I could not make enough money to support my family in the manner we are accustomed if I were to change to a totally unrelated field. I’m fortunate to have skills that are transferable across industries though so hopefully this won’t be an issue. The company I work for now is not part of the automotive industry. But if push came to shove and Michigan became completely unviable, I would obviously then be forced to leave the metro Detroit area.

You’ll notice a lot of questions deal with leaving Detroit. I’m an optimist and think that Detroit will eventually come out on the other side if certain things go their way. What do you think is in store for Detroit? What do you think needs to happen for the city to make a comeback?

I definitely think you have to separate the discussion of the city of Detroit’s future from the suburbs and rest of Michigan. Personally, I’m not optimistic about the city of Detroit itself. I think the damage to Detroit has been done and I have very little confidence in city government and its citizens in being able to improve things. The unemployment rate in Detroit is now almost 25%.

On the other hand, there are other parts of Michigan (e.g. Detroit’s suburbs, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, etc.) that have a lot to offer (e.g. great universities, a growing health care industry, natural resources, tourism, strong leadership, etc.) that will contribute to the rest of Michigan’s ultimate success. In fact, while I don’t’ believe things have bottomed-out yet, I think there will be some real opportunities in Michigan (outside of Detroit).

Thanks to Chris for sharing his thoughts!

Next up I’ll be posting thoughts from another friend: a newly-minted dad in his early thirties who works as a lawyer.

Image by djtansey

The latest New Yorker has a profile on romance writer Nora Roberts—turns out she’s one of the most prolific writers around. She also gets paid a LOT to do what she does. I don’t read romance novels and I have no interest in reading any of her books, but one thing in the profile stood out to me. She was talking about not ever quitting on a story.

I will beat it. I will wrestle it to the ground. It will not defeat me.

I love this attitude. I have so many stories and ideas for stories just languishing in some folder under my desk because I’ve fallen out of love with them. They”re old and don’t feel exciting anymore, so I just file them away and tell myself it’s the ideas that aren’t good enough.

But really it’s me that isn’t trying hard enough.

What I need to do is take a page out of Nora Roberts’ playbook and take these stories as challenges. Make them work. Make them good. Wrestle them to the ground until they tap out.

Let’s say you’re a famous journalist that writes for The New York Times. You’ve written several books that have become best sellers and now you want to write your next book. Thanks to your contacts, your experience, and you’re fame, you have unprecedented access to top-level government officials and experts on all kinds of subjects from around the world. And as you try to figure out what the topic for your next book should be, you finally settle on the topic you think is the most important and most urgent.

Your next book, you realize, could help turn the tide when it comes to global warming and the energy crisis in this country.

Your next book could save the world.

And as you’re putting together your notes and all your research, you have to figure out what the best way to make your argument is. Will be by showing the world the startling numbers you’ve uncovered that show we are on a collision course with—literally—the end of the world? Or do you play on people’s emotions to get them to really feel how urgent this whole situation is? I mean, don’t pictures of starving children work better than statistics of how many kids die every day from starvation?

(By the way, the answer to that question is yes)

That’s the position Thomas Friedman must’ve found himself as he was writing his latest book: Hot, Flat, and Crowded. It’s about global warming, it’s about politics, and it’s about the role the United States will or will not play in the world.

Which is interesting, because as we learned from How We Decide, the struggle between the rational and the emotional is a complicated one. Friedman decides to appeal to both (a smart choice)—although this duplicity gives the book a kind of duality that at times makes you feel like you’re reading a call to arms. Most of the time, however, you feel like you’re reading a textbook for a college class that—while it’s very interesting—can get a little dry.

The Emotional Argument

Friedman goes after our emotions right off the bat in the first chapter. Which gives you a false sense of how the rest of the book is going to go.

After I finished the first chapter I was telling my wife how great my book was and how I couldn’t wait to get an hour or two to read as much as I could. It’s filled with compelling storylines: the United States is in a lot of trouble and there’s only one way to fix it. There are good guys and there are bad guys. But fear not! There is a way to fix all of it—and not only is it going to save the world, it’s going to make the US the country every person in the world admires and holds up as a shining example.

Remember those days?

The beginning of the book gets you all hyped up, which is great, but he Friedman knows he can’t just get by on rhetoric. He has to deliver the facts, and there are lots of them in this book.

The Facts & Numbers

There’s a lot of ground to cover here (we are talking about the end of the world as we know it), so Friedman decides to break all his data down into five major problems:

1. Increasing demand for scarce energy supplies: There isn’t enough energy to go around without killing the planet
2. Tons of money going to oil-rich countries or “petrodicatorships:” Do we want to be at the mercy of whatever country has oil, regardless of their policies?
3. Climate change: CO2 levels are at a point where we don’t know what will happen
4. Energy poverty: Too many people don’t have electricity
5. Biodiversity loss: Species are dying out

There is lots to cover here, and I’m not going to go into a bunch of details on each one—I’ll save that for those of you who will want to read the book. But among all the facts and figures Friedman drops in here (which is the majority of the book), here are some interesting nuggets that’ll give you an idea of how he presents his case.

Cattle Belching: Friedman gets into so much detail that he even discusses the environmental effects of cattle belching. According to Friedman, “A herd of cattle belching can be worse than a highway full of Hummers.” Yikes!

China and India (and everyone else) finally are getting to live like Americans. This one is especially interesting to me. Developing countries are starting to live the lives of Americans—A/C whenever they want it, computers, TVs, big cars, etc. The problem is that if China and India adopt the American lifestyle, the planet is doomed. Seriously. So we have to make sure they don’t live the lives we’re currently living right now—it’s too dirty. Is that fair?

Chop sticks! I love eating Thai food with chopsticks, but check this stat out: “China itself uses 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks a year, or 1.66 million cubic meters of timber.” Sorry China, time to eat with your hands from now on.

Connection between oil price and freedom. This one is kind of freaky. Friedman gets a hold of some strange indicators that somehow measure the freedom within a country. They look at rule of law, political parties formed, newspaper activities, etc. And then he charted that against the price of oil and found a directly inverse relationship. As the price of oil went up in oil-rich countries, the level of freedom came down. Why? Because these countries become so powerful when oil prices go up that they don’t have to play ball. They can be jerks but the rest of the world is at their mercy—it’s like having a real jerk as your drug dealer. You still want the product so you’ll deal with whatever you have to to get your fix.

The Bahrain Case study. That last one got you thinking, didn’t it? What if an oil rich country ran out of oil—how would they behave then? Well, probably like Bahrain did. They overhauled their educational system and changed the laws to make it easier for outsiders to invest in the country. They had themselves a little revolution because they knew those fat oil checks weren’t going to be there for long. So they had to do something about it. They had to play ball with the rest of the world. Iran and Saudi Arabia don’t have to do that. Yet.

Weathermen and politics. A lot of people still see global warming and the “green movement” as a political thing. I like to talk about the science part of it, not the politics. But apparently weather people around the country that have tried to discuss the effects of global warming are getting lambasted from their viewers for injecting their political point of view into their forecasts. People are upset because they just want the weather, not “politics.” But who else can tap people on the shoulders and say “that huge flood last week? That was because of increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere”? No one, that’s who. These weather people are damned if they do and damned if they do.

Biodiversity isn’t just about “saving species.” Look at this from a practical point of view. How would you “sell” people on the idea of species conservation? Telling them how beautiful a gold-encrusted flapping duck is won’t cut it. But biodiversity has a very real, very practical side: it’s about giving ourselves the tools to adapt to whatever comes at us in the future. We’re not sure how current CO2 levels will affect us, but we’ll need all the biodiversity we can get in order to try to find cures and medicines to deal with what’s to come. The less diversity there is, the fewer cures we will find.

It may already be too late. This is the scary part. Sometimes you’ll read a paragraph and feel like it’s too late. This call to action is a few years too late—we’re headed for the abyss and even if he hit the brakes right now (which isn’t likely), we’d still fall off the cliff. Scary.

If you take one thing from this book. I love it when authors make it this easy on readers. Here is what Friedman wants you to take from his book:

We are not going to regulate our way out of the problems of the Energy-Climate Era. We can only innovate our way out, and the only way to do that is to mobilize the most effective and prolific system for transformational innovation and commercialization of new products ever created on the face of the earth—the U.S. marketplace.

This gives you a glimpse into how practical and sober Friedman’s argument is. He doesn’t think that we should all do this for the goodness of the planet—that sell would never work. But if we make it about profits and making money—that is what can cause the kind of change and innovation he’s talking about. Sad, but true.

Regulation works: China as an example. China is often seen as a totalitarian government with little for the US to imitate. But there’s actually one thing we should take from them, and that’s regulation. China can (and has) laid down the law about certain things—like car efficiency standards. They pass laws in the snap of a finger and just like that cars are more efficient. Plastic bags get outlawed at supermarkets and boom—1.3 billion people are no longer using plastic bags. The US government is used to telling us and giving us what we want instead of what is right for us and the environment. We need to be a little bit more like China.

What Works Best?

It may seem odd that I’m focusing on this whole issue of numbers vs. emotions when it comes to this book—so let me explain why. There are a lot of people out there that don’t think global warming is a problem. There are people that think it’s a problem but that little things like changing light bulbs and recycling are enough for us to do. Then there are people that agree with Friedman on the severity of this problem but don’t know what to do or how to spread this message of urgency.

That, to me, is at the most important part of this book. As Friedman says, the only way we’re going to navigate through this problem and arrive at solutions that will actually matter is by pushing our leaders and our government to act. So the biggest lesson to take from this book, once you confront the unmistakable fact that the planet will be fundamentally different (and not in a good way) if we don’t do something drastic as soon as possible, is finding the answer to one question: what can I do?

Once we realize that all we can do is affect our leadership so they do what they need to do to set up laws and price signals and other strategies like them, then we come to the conclusion that we need to find a way to pass this sense of urgency on to others. To as many people as possible. Because this green revolution won’t happen from the top down, it’s going to have to start from the bottom up, and that means citizens like you and I demanding change.

Sound corny? It is. But that’s only because I haven’t found a way to get this across without being corny or preachy (which I refuse to do). All I can say for now is this: if someone you know isn’t buying into the urgency behind climate crisis, give them this book and tell them to read it.

They’ll thank you once we’re done. We all will.

• Ben Casnocha has a great post on fear and confidence that’s well worth the read, especially for Mike Tyson/boxing fans. It’s an issue that most of us would rather just put aside and not deal with because fear is supposed to be something that only “weak” people feel. But in reality, we’re all scared of something in our day-to-day lives and this is a nice post on what that fear really means and how it can drive us.
• My very good friend Andrew has done a lot of work on his site and you can tell. Check out AndrewDavidNelson for an inspirational look at travel, music, photography, and just life in general. I wish my site were more like Andrew’s in that he didn’t build it to make money or to show off. You can tell he’s just expressing himself and it is bursting with sincerity and creativity. Meanwhile I have an huge ad for LendingClub on the right. I guess to each his own, but make sure to check out his site if you want an escape from the day-to-day. Especially his travel stuff…he’s taken some amazing trips.

I’m the type of person that typically overthinks the smallest of decisions and wavers back and forth until the last minute. So I’ve always been curious about what exactly is going on in my brain when I’m having such a hard time deciding.

So when I read the inside cover of this book, which claims it to be “The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help us make the best decisions,” I thought to myself “Maybe I should try it.”

Then, five minutes later: “Ehh…maybe not.”

The inside jacket also promises to answer two questions: How does the human mind make decisions? And how can we make those decisions better? The book can get a little deep into the brain stuff, but overall it accomplishes its goal with lots of short, interesting stories.

Emotions Aren’t Our Enemies

Being a quarterback isn’t easy. Making decisions about whether to pass or not, who to throw it to, what the defense is doing, if you’re about to get tackled by a 300-pound angry defender—all that stuff is not easy to process and still perform.

But Tom Brady (and quarterbacks in general) seems to do it just fine. How is that? What’s going on in his brain that allows him to perform at such a high caliber when no one expected him to amount to much (he was the 199th pick of the 2000 draft)?

Is it because he has some obvious physical talent? Probably not, since he was drafted so low. Is it because he’s a much smarter player than other quarterbacks? If so, the Wonderlic tests that college players are given before the draft would show some kind of correlation between high scores and good careers.

But they don’t. Solving  complicated equations and throwing a football under pressure seem to involve two completely different parts of the brain. If a quarterback were to rationally think about the pros and cons of every possible decision he’s faced with while he’s on the field, he’d be a walking, talking tackling dummy. There’s just no time for all that thinking.

So what’s the answer?

Lehrer tells us that Brady is using the most powerful, well developed part of all our brains: our emotions. He even uses a great analogy that I wish he would’ve visualized on the cover instead of the ice-cream cones because I feel it truly shows the essence of his book.

According to Lehrer, the emotional center of our brain is like a computer—capable of thousands of processes at light speeds. The “other” part of our brain, which is what the Wonderlic measures, is our reason. That is the newest part of the human brain. It isn’t very well developed and can only handle a limited amount of simple tasks. If our emotions are a computer, reason is a calculator.

The first two chapters of the book are devoted to debunking this myth about our emotions: that they turn us into irrational animals that make terrible decisions because our emotions have clouded proper judgment.

Here’s Tom Brady on how he decides where to throw when he’s playing QB:

I don’t know how I know where to pass. There are no firm rules. You just feel like you’re going to the right place…And that’s where I throw it.

Think about it for a second: if Brady were to treat this like a math problem, it would go something like this:

Hike!

OK, let’s see, there goes the safety. I’m going to stay away from the center of the field.

Oh there goes Troy Brown on his route—looks pretty well covered though.

Whoa, is the pocket starting to collapse? That guy over there looks like he’s getting too close.

Did the running back pick up the blitz? Looks like it.

Hey, Troy just made an excellent cut, maybe I can throw it to him if I lead him just enough to avoid the other defender in that area.

Gosh there are a lot of flashes coming from the stands…well, it is the Super Bowl.

Suffice to say, Tom Brady’s rational side would get sacked into submission and wouldn’t have a very promising career. Or a long life span. Tom Brady is great at what he does because he’s listening to how he feels and how he feels is being regulated by something called dopamine.

Here’s the gist on dopamine: it’s a neurotransmitter that floods our system when certain things happen. For example: Leher tells the story of a guy in the military in 1991 whose job was to protect the allied fleet by making sure nothing fishy was happening on radar. He suddenly sees something that makes him very nervous. It’s a blip that looks just like all the others that regularly come on his screen—nothing out of the ordinary—but for some reason he can’t quite pinpoint, it bothers him.

Something about it is off.

It’s his decision to either send a command to shoot the blip down or let it go. Here’s the problem: allied airplanes are always running the very same route that this blip is. Yet this radar guy is convinced something is off. After some deliberation, he orders the plane be shot down. And it is. Some tense moments later, it’s confirmed that it was an Iraqi missile but his superiors are mortified because he can’t explain why he ordered it be shot down. He’s relieved, obviously, but he still doesn’t know what it was that made him nervous about that blip.

The explanation lies in dopamine. The way our body is wired is to flood us with dopamine when our expectations are met (this feels good), and to trigger negative emotions when something that doesn’t match our expectations happens. This guy had been trained for a long time and had spent countless hours staring at blips on his radar. So the pathways and movements were burned into his brain, whether he knew it or not. But something that he rationally could not describe happened. The blip did something that his emotions picked up on. So they triggered the sweaty palms and uncertainty.

His emotions told him this was a missile before he knew what was going on.

The same goes for Tom Brady. Countless hours of practice have wired his brain to feel and react to certain things before he even knows what’s going on (for more on the importance of practice, check out my review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers). That’s why practice is so important and that’s what allows Tom Brady to rely on these decisions when he’s out on the field. They’re way more powerful than if he tried thinking it all out in his head.

The whole point of this chapter is for us to stop thinking that our emotions are only there to get into trouble. They are the most primitive because they’ve been with us the longest. But that doesn’t mean we become neanderthals when we rely on them—it means they are the most sharpened tools at our disposal.

Reason is not everything.

But Emotions Can Fool Us

Before you go on your tirade about how your emotions have gotten you in trouble before (at your job, your love life, etc.) to debunk Lehrer’s first point, hold on—he does it himself. After he tells us how great our emotions are, he also goes through some examples of how our emotions can betray us.

Who doesn’t love surprises? I’ve always recommended a surprise as the best kind of gift you can give another person. And if you’ve ever been truly surprised, you know how great of a feeling it is.

It’s because our brains are wired that way. Dopamine is even more powerful when something unexpected happens. That’s all well and good unless you’re doing something like playing slots.

Slots are totally random machines with no patterns. So when you win at slots, it feels good. But the brain feels even better because it had no idea the reward was coming. Like a crack addict yearning for that first high, the slots are designed to get us chasing that surprise again so we can get that exhilarating feeling all over again.

This kind of stuff can get us into all kinds of trouble, especially our finances. Take the stock market, another completely random, unpredictable thing. Our brain can’t stand that this system is completely random, so it tries to impose a pattern on it. We think we’ve solved the pattern and our brain makes us feel really good by buying the recent hot stock or mutual fund.

It also affects how we spend our money, and credit-card companies are making a mint because of it. Our brain registers spending differently when we take cash out of our wallet and hand it over then when we take out a piece of plastic and run it through a machine (something all personal-finance writers know about). The brain doesn’t like handing over large amounts of cash—it’s like we’re losing something we hold very dear. Paying with plastic, however, doesn’t cause that same feeling. So we spend and spend and spend—happy to have what we want and happy to not feel as guilty about it. Until the bills get bloated and out of control. Then we feel even worse.

Our feelings, powerful as they are, can be manipulated in ways that can get us into big trouble. And that’s when we need the help of our familiar friend: reason.

Reason to the Rescue

So our emotions are a powerful computer. That’s great—but what about reason? According to Lehrer, the rational part of our brain is like a calculator—great for small, simple tasks, but a nightmare for more complicated decisions.

Lehrer tells us a few stories where reason saved lives. One of them is about Wag Dodge (I remember hearing his story before, a long time ago, but have no idea where), a firefighter that was trapped in a grassy plain with other fellow firefighters with a huge wall of fire (the Mann Gulch fire) coming their way. It was pretty clear they couldn’t outrun the fire, it was coming much too fast, but most of the firefighters did just that.

Their emotions were telling them that a fire was about to kill them and they had to get away as quickly as possible. There’s nothing complicated about that formula. Fire = death. So their emotions were telling them to run for the hills.

Wag was running too, until reason came to his rescue. He suddenly realized that if he continued running he would be burned alive. There was no use running. That calmed him down and almost like a switch reason took control. And reason suddenly came up with a great idea.

So he stopped running and lit a match, igniting the grass in front of him and watching it burn up just as fast as the fire behind him was chasing him down. Then he stepped into the burnt grass and laid down, hoping the fire would burn right around and over him. Thirteen firefighters died. Wag Dodge survived.

The reason Lehrer runs through this and other examples is to show that reason can do some great things when it isn’t obscured by emotion. It can come up with creative new ways to solve problems no one has ever had before. This creativity and thinking is crucial to certain kinds of situations. Situations where it’s very easy to let your emotions take over and make bad decisions.

Overthinking

If anything, Lehrer is a fair man. He talks good and bad about our emotions and he does the same for reason. Just as our emotions can lead us astray, so too can reason. In his chapter “Choking on Thought” he talks about people who try to make decisions and start to overthink.

Professional athletes do this all the time. Think about it: these are people who have trained long and hard to automate the things they do. Like Tom Brady. Like Chuck Knoblauch—remember him? He’s the baseball player who couldn’t throw the ball in the infield anymore because of something going on in his head. He was probably using too much reason to do something he should’ve put on autopilot.

I’ve seen this playing baseball. I do it all the time, but one time when I was pitching I saw an extreme. This young kid was catching me and he was real eager to do a good job. Which is great. So he comes into the game in the fifth inning or so and I’m pitching. He calls for a slider and I shake my head no. He calls for it again. I shake him off, a little confused. The calls for the slider again, this time with some oomph. As in, “Just throw it!”

I was shocked—a pitcher is like a woman. If he says no, then you move on. But this kid just didn’t get it. I didn’t want to make a big scene, so I through the pitch and moved on. Once we were in the dugout I asked him what the hell his problem was. His answer:

I could see you didn’t want to throw the slider but I noticed that in his last at bat he got a little jammed. Plus our infield was playing back so I figured he’s pull it right at them. Also, the grass is a little high today and with the shadows creeping up on the plate and the dirty baseball, he’s not going to be able to square up on the ball too good.

We were all speechless until one of our veterans spoke up. “Kid,” he told him. “This ain’t the big leagues. Just go out there and stop thinking so much. And if he doesn’t want to throw the slider, call something else.”

He was doing a little too much thinking on the baseball field and it was making him look and sound like a total moron (or a robot). Either way, it wasn’t a good thing. You don’t need a computer to catch a baseball.

The Poker Hand

So now we know that our emotions are powerful computers and reason is a calculator. And we know that too much of either can hurt us. So now what?

Here is where the book starts to answer the second question it promised to address in the inside jacket: how can we make better decisions? In order to help us answer that question, the last chapter deals with poker.

You see, poker is a game that requires the use of both sides of our brain. You need the rational part to figure out which cards you need and when you’ll see them (especially if you can count cards). But you also need to know when/how to bluff, which is the domain of your emotions. A great poker player has both of these qualities and knows when to break out each one.

This last chapter tells a longer, more drawn out story than the other ones in the book. It’s similar to Outliers and it’s very entertaining.

But he eventually starts to wrap it up:

If you’re going to take only one idea away from this book, take this one: Whenever you make a decision, be aware of the kind of decision you are making and the kind of thought process it requires.

I love it when authors do this because it tells you how important this central idea is to him/her.

And that’s really what Lehrer is trying to say here. There is no perfect answer. We can make better decisions by paying attention to what we’re thinking and feeling. By analyzing our past mistakes and learning from them. By knowing how both sides of the brain work so we know why we feel the way we do—which is what the book actually does.

Some might be disappointed with Lehrer’s answer—most of us want a magic formula or some kind of inspiring quote. But that’s because we’re wired that way, and Lehrer understands that.

Overall, How We Decide comes through on its promise. It explains how our brains work when we’re making decisions and what we can do about it. Some of the details on the brain stuff can get a little high end for me, but you don’t have to know it to appreciate what he’s saying. To me, the examples are the best part of the book. And while I like longer ones like in Outliers, he manages to compile a good amount of interesting examples which will probably mean you’ll find at least one or two you really love.

I know I did.

Now I just need to decide which book I’ll read next…

————— o ——————-

There are other countless stories in the book—some are very engrossing and some are just OK. Unlike Outliers, which tells fewer but longer stories, How We Decide tells a lot more stories and a shorter time span. I wish I could touch on all of them here, but if you like Deal or No Deal, chess-playing computers, educational testing, and behavioral experiments, then I really recommend you check this book out. It’s filled with great little anecdotes that help highlite his main points.

Starting a new job isn’t easy—there’s usually a fair bit of stress involved as you adjust to new people and a new flow. After a while, you adjust and things get a little easier and the days aren’t as stressful. But then there are those inevitable days or weeks when things get really crazy: too many clients for too few employees, an impossible deadline, a promotion that has you doing new things you’ve never done before…by Friday.

We’ve all been there. But what can you do besides burn out, try your best, and hope you don’t melt down? Here are some tips on how to deal with crazy work situations so it doesn’t totally stress you out and take over your life:

Organize

This should be your first step. Write down everything you have to do and all the people you have to talk to, no matter how insignificant it may sound. The idea here is to just get it all on paper.

Plan

Take that list you just created and start putting dates next to each bullet. If no one has given you a deadline, create one for yourself and give yourself plenty of time. This is going to be your roadmap, so make sure you give yourself enough time.

Focus

Start with the first thing on focus on that one thing. One big problem people run into is trying to do too many things at once and that can be overwhelming. Work on one task and complete it, then move on to the next.

Compartmentalize

Leave your work at home. Don’t come home and start talking about all the stuff you just left behind in the office. Let it go. It’s going to stress you out enough at work without bringing it into your happy place.

Escape

Do something that will take your mind off of work. Remind yourself that there’s a whole world out there that could care less about what you do. In the grand scheme of things, it’s nothing. Watch a movie, read a book, enjoy time with your spouse, play with your kids, ride your bike, practice a hobby, go for a run, etc. Do something you love.

Work is always going to have its stressful times, but hopefully these tips will help you deal with them without freaking out.

Photo by orangeacid

Which is why I’m so excited to be hosting this carnival because it’s a totally different spin on the whole Carnival system. I’ve picked six of the best posts I could find over the past week and it’s up to you, the reader, to vote and decide which one is the winner.

1. Cash Money Life reminds us to think long term—something I’ve been chewing on a lot lately.
2. Blunt Money likes the simplicity and focus behind the In-N-Out business model.
3. Wealth Pilgrim shares his dramatic story and how he made it through a very tough time.
4. Frugal Dad’s image says it all—ignorance will keep you from achieving your goals.
5. Being Frugal takes a look at Dave Ramsey’s gazelle intensity and points out that we still have to live our lives.
6. ChristianPF shows us how surviving the recession is all about adjusting and being flexible in everything we do.

Good luck!

I use the first one all the time when I talk about a friend of mine I consider the smartest person I’ve ever known. I use the latter a lot when I’m watching sports, especially when you’re watching guys like Lebron James or Johan Santana.

Let’s face it, most of us are fascinated by the idea of “the genius.” This idea of a person that was born with incredible intelligence or physical ability is something we love to see.

But what’s really going on with these freaks of nature? Did they just inherit some random gene that we don’t have? Are they just lucky? Couldn’t we learn something from looking at what they’ve done and how they’ve done it?

Malcolm Gladwell’s new book is out to answer those questions, not with knee-jerk answers and speculation, but with hard data.

And the things he found out about these so-called geniuses—or Outliers as he calls them—will blow your mind.

There are a few reasons I was excited to read Outliers: first of all, I loved The Tipping Point. Also, making research and hard data interesting and writing it out in an accessible way isn’t easy, but Gladwell seems to do it with great ease.

Then there was a recent article in the New Yorker comparing teachers and quarterbacks that I thought was brilliant. I mean, who would’ve thunk to relate teachers and quarterbacks? And make it entertaining too?

Let’s face it: Gladwell is just plain interesting.

As I read through the book, I’ve been sharing the stuff inside it with everyone that will listen because there are so many interesting stories inside. So I’m going to try to highlight those interesting things without totally ruining the book for those that want to read it themselves.

Gladwell opens the book by telling us what he’s setting out to do, and that’s explain how success happens. He’s basically taking a shot at the whole myth of the self-made man, of the genius. According to Gladwell, there is no such thing as a person who rose from nothing and did it all by himself.

By using real-world examples and backing it all up with hard data, Gladwell sets out to prove that there is no such thing as genius as we typically think of it. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes, and he goes about putting his case together one quality at at a time.

According to Gladwell, it takes luck, preparation, opportunity, nature,  cultivation, and culture.

LUCK

If you had to guess what the most important quality was for a great hockey player, what would it be?

Stamina? Strength? Toughness?

Gladwell opens up the book by showing us charts of different Canadian junior league hockey-team rosters. Specifically, he wants to show us the birth dates for all those players. This is what Gladwell does: he points at something that seems insignificant and then he tells you what’s really happening behind the scenes.

It turns out most really good hockey prospects are born in January, February, or March.

The more he looked, the more Barnsley came to believe that what he was seeing was not a chance occurrence but an iron law of Canadian hockey: in any elite group of hockey players—the very best of the best—40 percent of the players will have been born between January and March, 30 percent between April and June, 20 percent between July and September, and 10 percent between October and December.

How does Gladwell make sense of this data? In his words, “The explanation for this is quite simple.” It’s about the cutoff date that separates players from the different age brackets. The cutoff date in Canadian hockey is January 1. So if you’re 10 years old and born in January, you could be playing with kids that won’t turn 10 until the end of the year.

That means the odds of you being stronger, faster, and tougher are pretty high.

The Canadian hockey players born in January, February, and March all have a huge advantage. An advantage over their peers that will compound and grow bigger as time goes on. This advantage, however, is born purely from luck—nothing more.

But there’s more to being a success than luck—you also have to prepare to put yourself in a position to take advantage of any luck that might come your way. And that’s where preparation comes into play.

PREPARATION

We talkin’ about practice? Yes Allan, we’re talking about practice. Gladwell devotes a whole chapter to the idea of practice and the research keeps churning out one magical number: 10,000. As in 10,000 hours of practice.

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything.” —Neurologist Daniel Levitin

According to the research, it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a “world-class expert” at something, anything. I guess now we know why Allan Iverson is so upset in his rant about practice—he’s more than likely already put in his 10,000 hours. So we’ll forgive him for that little rant.

Gladwell gives us examples of people like Mozart, Bill Gates, and Bill Joy, but my favorite one is the one about the Beatles.

Turns out one of the most important places in the history of the Beatles isn’t Strawberry Fields or London, it’s Hamburg. Way before they became superstars, back in 1960, they got a gig in Hamburg that had nothing glamorous about it. It was basically playing at a glorified strip club filled with drunks and perverts. Not your idea of a place where geniuses hang out, now is it?

But they played for up to five hours at a time, seven days a week.

All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, in fact, they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times. Do you know how extraordinary that is? Most bands today don’t perform twelve hundred times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is one of the things that set the Beatles apart.

Gladwell isn’t saying the Beatles had no talent or special skills—far from it. He’s simply showing us the huge advantage they had over other bands by the time they came stateside—in Hamburg alone they had already gotten in their 10,000 hours. The US had no chance but to surrender to Beatle-mania—they may have been new on the scene, but they were already grizzled veterans.

Think about that number for a second: 10,000 hours. It got me thinking about myself, and I think you should do the same. What’s the one thing you practiced longer than anything else since you were a kid? Maybe it was a musical instrument or maybe it was a sport.

For me, it was baseball. I started practicing when I was 7, but I was terrible. So when I was 8 I began practicing five days a week, for two and a half hours every day. From when I was seven to when I was seventeen, the one thing I did more than anything else in my life was practice and play baseball. I played for the Guatemalan National team in Japan, in Panama, in Colombia, and in Mexico. When you’re on the National team, you practice a LOT. And guess what? I’m still not even close.

All told, from when I was 7 until I was 17, I managed to crank out just 4,000 hours of practice. And that was my passion—it was all I ever did or thought of. And I’m still 6,000 hours short! I guess that’s why I didn’t walk on to my college baseball team. I like to think of it as being unlucky: I wasn’t born in August (that’s the cut-off date in baseball).

How many hours can you account for on any one topic? If you’re anywhere near 10,000 hours, email me at thewriter at thewriterscoin.com because I’d love for you to be in my network (or at least give me an autograph).

The rice paddies

CULTURE

To explain the role of culture in achieving success, Gladwell decides to take a look at a very scary subject: plane crashes. Specifically, he’s looking at an accident that happened involving a Korea Air plane that went down without any panic in the cockpit.

Then he went to the tapes and analyzed what was happening—it turns out the captain was missing the signs that something was wrong but his underlings did not want to correct him or contradict him. He was, after all, the captain. So the plane crashed and they all died. All because, in Korean culture, there is an enormous respect for authority and the chain of command.

How crazy is that?

Gladwell then lines up statistics on countries that respect authority over all other things and saw a direct connection between that “respect” and airplane crashes. The cockpit becomes a death trap because no one wants to “show up” the captain.

He also brings up a stereotype about Asian people that most people wouldn’t even want to touch. Gladwell not only puts it out there…he tries to give us an explanation. One has to do with how the Chinese language deals with numbers—numbers are shorter and so it’s easier for kids to pick up. That means they start counting before we can—you could also file this away under luck.

But the real answer lies in the rice paddies of China.

Turns out there is a huge difference between farming culture as we think of it and the rice-farming culture of China. When I think of farming, I think of some grueling months of hard work followed by months of inactivity and “hibernation.” The rice paddies aren’t like that—Gladwell tells us that the average workload for a rice farmer is around 3,000 hours a year (that’s around a 50-hour workweek, 52 weeks a year, no time off…). This is the way it’s been since back in the day, so it’s become part of the culture.

But back to mathematics. Earlier on, Gladwell tells us what the three components are to finding your work satisfying: autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward. And it turns out rice farming has this in droves. It’s a very exact science that needs to be tweaked just right, you can do it all on your own, and every tweak you make leads to a better result. That’s why rice farmers diversify their crop—it protects them in case one of them doesn’t do as well. Even in the rice paddies, Chinese kids are learning a lesson in portfolio diversification!

NATURE

According to Gladwell, once you’ve put in the work and had a little bit of luck go your way, you still to get a chance. The Beatles had Hamburg, the lawyer he uses as an example—Joe Flom—got his opportunity by being excluded because he was Jewish. But that turned out to be the break he needed.

Then you have a man Gladwell spends a lot of time on: Chris Langan. Langan might be the smartest person in the world—his IQ  is between 195 and 210. According to that number, he’s “smarter” that Albert Einstein. But he isn’t a stuffy professor that looks like a Star Trek nerd. Nope—Chris Langan was a bouncer at a bar and loves lifting weights.

There are more clips on Chris Langan over on YouTube.

Gladwell’s point about Chris Langan isn’t that he’s a failed genius, it’s that he wasn’t given the tools he needed to fully exploit his genius. He can’t relate to people very well and that’s what has kept him on the outside looking in his whole life. He was lucky, in a way, but he wasn’t given the tools he needed to interact with other people so his genius could be fully enjoyed.

The author

NOW WHAT?

I’ve only scratched the surface of all the interesting stuff Gladwell talks about. He goes on to explain how education can be fixes without buying fancy computers or hiring “better” teachers, but by having students spend more time at school instead of going on summer vacation. He analyzes the KIPP-style of school to make his point, and by the end of it you’ll be convinced he’s onto something.

But after he shows you how all these dots are connected in these very surprising, very interesting ways, you start to wonder: how can we use this information to give more people a chance? To try to “give” more people the chance at luck and preparation? He briefly mentions this and, really, it’s not this book’s job to go into any depth on it. But I would’ve liked more.

Hopefully someone will use this book as a model to create better ways to educate kids and give them all a better chance at being successful.

Until then, Gladwell has done an incredible job of writing something that informs, entertains, and creates a platform on how the world can become a better place.

Not too shabby, Malcolm, not too shabby.