The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

One of the things I like about Maugham novels is that they generally take me some time to figure out. I’ve written before about how Maugham seems exceptionally skilled at merging theme to plot in his fiction -- letting one serve the other until they become almost indistinguishable from each other. In other words, it is only through the action of the novel that the message can be discerned. This is likely why is takes time to understand what Maugham is trying to say. One has to let the plot unfold before a judgment can be made.

In this case, the shadowiest of clues is giving my the novel’s title and its epigraph:

“...the painted veil which those who live call Life.”

It’s a line from Shelley, and in the context of the novel that follows it is clearly a reference to the comforts of an unexamined life, and the attendant risks associated with lifting it.

Our protagonist is Kitty Fane, the young and unserious wife of the older and very serious scientist Walter, who, growing bored while stationed in the Far East with her husband, demands more from life and has an affair with an attractive and erudite diplomat named Charles Townsend. When her husband discovers her infidelity, he forces Kitty to accompany him to the heart of a cholera epidemic in rural China. There, stripped of the British society of her youth she is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life.

In other words, to lift the veil.

Here’s an example of some of her soul searching, brought on by the contrast between her previous hedonism and the overpowering poverty, sickness, and death that surrounds her. In this scene, her husband Walter has himself just died of the cholera he worked so hard to cure, and Kitty is speaking to a fellow British traveler named Waddington.

“Do you think the soul is immortal?” she asked.

He did not seem surprised at the question.

“How should I know?”

“Just now, when they washed Walter, before they put him into the coffin, I looked at him. He looked very young. Too young to die. Do you remember that beggar that we saw the first time you took me for a walk? I was frightened not because he was dead, but because her looked as though he’d never been a human being. He was just a dead animal. And now again, with Walter, it looked so like a machine that has run down. That’s what is so frightening, And if it is only a machine how futile is all this suffering and the heart pains and the misery.”

He did not answer, but his eyes traveled over the landscape at their feet. The wide expanse on that gay and sunny morning filled the heart with exultation. The trim little rice-fields stretched as far as the eye could see and in many of them the blue-clad peasants with their buffaloes were working industriously. It was a peaceful and happy scene. Kitty broke the silence.

“I can’t tell you how deeply moved I’ve been by all I’ve seen at the convent. They’re wonderful, those nuns, they make me feel utterly worthless. They give up everything, their home, their country, love, children, freedom; and all the little things which I sometimes think must be harder still to give up, flowers and green fields, going for a walk on an autumn day, books and music, comfort, everything they give up, everything. And they do it so that they may devote themselves to a life of sacrifice and poverty, obedience, killing work, and prayer. To all of them this world is really and truly a place of exile. Life is a cross which they willingly bear, but in their hearts all the time is the desire -- oh, it’s so much stronger than desire, it’s a longing, an eager, passionate longing for the death which shall lead them to life everlasting.”

Kitty clasped her hands and looked at him with anguish.

“Well?”

“Supposing there is no life everlasting? Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They’ve given up all for nothing. They’ve been cheated. They’re dupes.”

Waddington reflected for a little while.

“I wonder. I wonder if it matters that what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.”

This, I think, is Maugham’s own philosophy of life coming through. I’ve seen it in too many of his other works to think otherwise. The life of the artist, struggling against the reality of his own death, and succeeding only in the struggle, not the in the achievement. But for Kitty…

Kitty sighed. What he said seemed hard. She wanted more.

“Have you ever been to a symphony concert?” he continued.

“Yes,” she smiled. “I know nothing of music, but I’m rather fond of it.”

“Each member of the orchestra plays his own little instrument, and what do you think he knows of the complicated harmonies which unroll themselves on the indifferent air? He is concerned only with his own small share. But he knows that the symphony is lovely, and though there’s none to hear it, it is lovely still, and he is content to play his part.”

“You spoke of Tao the other day,” said Kitty, after a pause. “Tell me what it is.”

Waddington gave her a little look, hesitated an instant, and then with a faint smile on his comic face answered:

“It is the Way and the Waygoer. It is the eternal road along which walk all beings, but no being made it, for itself is being. It is everything and nothing. From it all things spring, all things conform to it, and to it at last all things return. It is a square without angles, a sound which ears cannot hear, and an image without form. It is a vast net and though its meshes are as wide as the sea it lets nothing through. It is the sanctuary where all things find refuge. It is nowhere, but without looking out of the window you may see it. Desire not to desire, it teaches, and leave all things to take their course. He that humbles himself shall be preserved entire. He that bends shall be made straight. Failure is the foundation of success and success is the lurking-place of failure; but who can tell when the turning point will come? He who strives after tenderness can become even as a little child. Gentleness brings victory to him who attacks and safety to him who defends. Mighty is he who conquers himself.”

“Does it mean anything?”

“Sometimes, when I’ve had half a dozen whiskies and look at the stars, I think perhaps it does.”

Waddington cannot take the Tao seriously -- not unless he’s drunk and looking dreamily at the stars. Neither can Kitty. And in their places I would argue that neither can Maugham. Desire not to desire, it teaches, but the artist must desire to create, to achieve, to transcend, or he cannot be an artist.

In the end, The Painted Veil is a novel that flirts with eastern philosophy, but which doesn’t embrace it. In a final scene between Kitty and her lover Charles Townsend, she better summarizes the plight of man in her contempt of him and the very instincts that drove her.

“Hang it all, [Townsend said,] I’m not a stick or a stone. It’s so unreasonable, the way you look at it; it’s so morbid. I thought after yesterday you’d feel a little more kindly to me. After all, we’re only human.”

“I don’t feel human. I feel like an animal. A pig or a rabbit or a dog. Oh, I don’t blame you, I was just as bad. I yielded to you because I wanted you. But it wasn’t the real me. I’m not that hateful, beastly, lustful woman. I disown her. It wasn’t me that lay on that bed panting for you when my husband was hardly cold in his grave and your wife had been so kind to me, so indescribably kind. It was only the animal in me, dark and fearful like an evil spirit, and I disown, and hate, and despise it. And ever since, when I’ve thought of it, my gorge rises and I feel that I must vomit.”

He frowned a little and gave a short, uneasy snigger.

“Well, I’m fairly broadminded, but sometimes you say things that positively shock me.”

“I should be sorry to do that. You’d better go now. You’re a very unimportant little man and I’m silly to talk to you seriously.”

Indeed. In much of the society that Maugham writes about, there are many unimportant little men, for whom it is silly if we stoop to take them seriously. Although Kitty does not like what she sees after lifting the veil, at least she has done so and can move forward on whatever sounder footing she has found there.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 28 (DRAFT)

“Thank you for that report, Alan,” Eleanor was saying twenty minutes later, after my presentation and with everyone reconvened around the board table. “Are there any questions?”

“Yes, I have one.”

It was Paul Webster, the immediate past chair of the board, the man, I knew, that Eleanor has just taken the gavel from, his term as chair ending and hers beginning at the start of this very board meeting. Other than that, I didn’t know him at all. I hardly knew anyone on the board. Mary kept them very well insulated from me and the rest of the staff. All I knew about Paul was what he looked like—a gray-haired bureaucrat in a blue suit.

“Paul?” Eleanor said, acknowledging him as having the floor.

“It’s my understanding that two senior staff people have recently left the organization—Susan Sanford and Michael Lopez. Both of whom had significant responsibilities associated with this conference.”

Paul paused, as if expecting me to affirm the truth of his statement. I kept my eyes on him, but could see Mary fidget in my peripheral vision, purposelessly lining up her pen with the top edge of her legal pad. As she had instructed, I held my tongue.

“What kind of contingency plans have been put in place to deal with their absence?”

There was no need for me to defer to Mary by word or gesture. She began speaking immediately, as if this was a play that had been rehearsed.

“We’re on top of it, Paul. Alan had been very engaged with Susan and Michael prior to their departures, and has been closely directing their staffs since then. He’s done an excellent job preparing them for added responsibility here in Miami.”

Paul turned towards Mary, allowing me to look at her fully. “Did you bring any additional staff to help with the logistics?”

“Excuse me?” Mary said. She picked up her pen and began tapping it on the pad.

“You’re down two senior staff positions. It sounds like you have confidence in Alan’s ability to provide the appropriate direction in their absence. But what about feet on the ground? This is a big conference with a lot of details to coordinate. Have you brought any additional staff from that office of yours to help make sure things go smoothly?”

Good question, I thought, and then suppressed a smile as Mary’s eyes flicked towards me and I saw the momentary indignation burning there. I knew for a fact that we hadn’t—that the travel, lodging and meal costs associated with Susan and Michael’s attendance had been one of the items she had put on the chopping block to help make up the deficit created by Eleanor’s exorbitant needs. We had even discussed it. I had tried to take advantage of the opportunity Paul was describing, thinking I could have used one or two extra sets of helping hands, but Mary had swiftly vetoed it.

“We discussed it,” Mary said, looking now at Paul but tipping her head in my direction to indicate who ‘we’ was. “But finally decided against it. Alan believes we are adequately staffed, and I trust his judgment. He believes that any additional people we might have brought would have been too inexperienced with this meeting to be of much help.”

Paul turned back to me. “Is that true, Alan? There’s no one at the home office who could have helped?”

From across the table I could see Mary staring at me, as if mentally reinforcing her pre-meeting instructions. Don’t contradict me. Even when you’re telling outright lies, Mary? Is that really what you expect me to do?

“Alan?”

Bitch. Of course that’s what she expected me to do.

“That’s right, Paul,” I said with a smile that moved my lips but didn’t reach my eyes. “We have a lot of confidence in our existing staff to rise to the challenge. They’re ready for it. It’s going to be a great meeting.”

There wasn’t much more I could say, but I tried to add as much nuance to my words as I could. I wanted my tone to convey shades of additional meaning. To Paul and the other members of the board, I hoped the tinge of smarminess I had used would communicate that the decision not to bring additional staff had not been mine, that regardless of what Mary said now the decision had been hers and had been made over my objection. And to Mary, I hoped she would hear that I clearly knew what she was doing, that by positioning this decision as mine I knew she was setting me up to take the blame if anything went wrong. I couldn’t do anything about it. Open defiance in front of the board would have been suicide, and she knew it. So I’d muddle through and be the good little soldier, but I wanted her to know I was onto her game.

Whether either shaded message got through I was never able to tell.

“Excellent,” Eleanor said. “Are there any other questions?”

A few moments of silence passed, several board members looking my way but no one speaking up.

“Then thank you, Alan, for your report and for your efforts on behalf of our organization. You’re welcome to stay as we move on to our next agenda item...”

I nodded my head and listened as fifteen people turned pages in their agenda books. I burned a stare into the side of Mary’s face, but she refused to make eye contact with me.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

If you want to enjoy this book, don’t see the movie first. Because the movie spoils the book, and not just from the point of view of giving away the twist.

Palahniuk, I think, describes more effectively how the movie spoils the book in his Afterword, which begins with an encounter he had with a cowboy tour guide for a never-described “Haunted Tunnel.”

There, another step into the dark, the cowboy says, “The first rule of the Haunted Tunnel Tour is you don’t talk about the Haunted Tunnel Tour.”

And I stop. The rope still a loose sagging smile between us.

“And the second rule of the Haunted Tunnel Tour,” the cowboy, his whiskey smell says, “is you don’t talk about the Haunted Tunnel Tour…”

The rope, the feeling of braided fibers, is twisted hard and greasy smooth in my hand. And still stopped, pulling back on the rope, I tell him: Hey…

From the dark, the cowboy says, “Hey, what?”

I say, I wrote that book.

The rope between us going tighter, tighter, tight.

And the rope stops the cowboy. From the dark, he says, “Wrote what?”

Fight Club, I tell him.

And there, the cowboy takes a step back up. The knock of his boot on a step, closer. He tilts his hat back for a better look and pushes his eyes at me, blinking fast, his breath boilermaker strong, breathalyzer strong, he says:

“There was a book?”

Yes. There was a book. It is the book that the movie spoiled because after the movie everything became a kind of vulgar pastiche. As Palahniuk describes in great detail, after the movie…

...Donatella Versace sewed razor blades into men’s clothing and called it the “fight club look.”

...Gucci fashion models walked the runway, shirtless with black eyes, bruised and bloodied and bandaged.

...Houses like Dolce and Gabbana launched their new men’s look -- satiny 1970s shirts in photo-mural patterns, camouflage-print pants and tight, low-slung leather pants -- in Milan’s dirty concrete basements.

...The band Limp Bizkit bannered their Web site with “Dr. Tyler Durden recommends a healthy dose of Limp Bizkit.

...The Onion newspaper ran an expose on “The Quilting Society,” where old ladies would meet in a church basement, lusting for “bare-knuckled, hand-stitching action,” where “the first rule of quilting society is you don’t talk about the quilting.”

...A zillion “Fuck Club” porn sites.

...A zillion restaurant reviews headlined: “Bite Club.”

...Rumble Boys, Inc. started labeling their men’s grooming products, hair mousse and gel, with Tyler Durden quotes.

...You could walk through airports and hear bogus public address announcements paging “Tyler Durden … Would Tyler Durden please pick up the white courtesy phone.

...People in Texas started wearing T-shirts printed with: “Save Marla Singer.”

Before all that there was a book -- a small book written at a particular time and in a particular cultural place.

At the same time, the bookstores were full of books like The Joy Luck Club and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and How to Make an American Quilt. These were all novels that presented a social model for women to be together. To sit together and tell their stories. To share their lives. But there was no novel that presented a new social model for men to share their lives.

This is the kernel that the book tries to honor, this new way for men to be and be together. From the novel itself:

You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive at fight club. When it’s you and one other guy under that one light in the middle of all those watching. Fight club isn’t about winning or losing fights. Fight club isn’t about words. You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything. There’s grunting and noise at fight club like at the gym, but fight club isn’t about looking good. There’s hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved.

This is the primal thing that lives at the center of the novel, and the thing that the movie and all that came after it exploits -- glorifying and perverting it at the same time.

If you want to enjoy this book, don’t see the movie first.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 27 (DRAFT)

I sat outside the room the board was meeting in for forty-five minutes. Well, I wasn’t actually sitting for most of that time; I was pacing, wondering what they were going to ask me and what tricks I’d have to perform for them.

I had never actually been to a board meeting before and didn’t know what to expect. The leadership conference Mary had taken me to earlier in the year to introduce me around had included a board meeting, but it had been more perfunctory than anything else—two hours of parliamentary motions, amendments, and question calls whizzing by before my eyes like a swift-moving freight train. What was happening now was a very different affair—a day and a half of environmental scanning, strategic conversations, and long-range planning prior to the start of our organization’s national conference. Decisions made here would be slow and deliberate, and they would reverberate throughout the year ahead as Mary worked to reshape the services we provided to align with the priorities and resource allocations selected by the board.

It was all very secretive. Mary liked it that way. Looking at the closed meeting room door I knew she was in there with them. She had come in two nights before—her sleeping room guaranteed for late arrival at the same overpriced hotel Eleanor had wanted for herself—and she had met with the board all day yesterday, and then taken them out for dinner at one of the best restaurants in town. Like Eleanor, no expense was spared when it came to the board’s itinerary, and Mary always included herself in their activities. My new position, as unique as it was, didn’t grant me access to their exclusive club. They would make most of their decisions without me, and it clearly wasn’t necessary for me to enjoy the same luxury accommodations they did.

But there was more to it than just where I sat in the pecking order. I’d done the math. My shorter itinerary and less-opulent housing were saving the organization more than eight hundred dollars in total—almost enough to offset one night’s lodging in Eleanor’s suite. And there were other planned cutbacks in the conference budget, enough to make up the rest of the difference, and in places where the VIPs and other attendees were unlikely to notice. Mary had been very precise in her line-item vetoes. The staff and the vendors we worked with—the people who actually made the conference happen—we would take it on the chin. She knew we’d suck it up and perform the best we could—our jobs depended on it. But ask the volunteers to give up one of their perks? Or ask the conference attendees to shoulder some piece of the burden? That was unthinkable.

When it was ten minutes past their scheduled break time, I stealthily approached the door and peeked through the little fish-eyed lens that allowed convention service staff to check on meetings inside without disturbing them. The most prominent feature I saw was the conference table itself—a mahogany monstrosity with cherry wood inlays and electrical, phone, and Internet jacks at every executive place setting. The people around the table seemed like afterthoughts, blurry figures shrunk down and widely separated from one another. Even with the distortion, however, I had no problem identifying Eleanor and Mary, two women sitting side by side at one end of the table, while fifteen other board members faced them, all men, their colorful ties slashing down their white shirts like open wounds. Pressing my ear against the door I struggled to hear what they were saying, but couldn’t make anything out.

I sat back down in the comfortable chair that had been placed opposite the board room door, an abstract painting and an ornate credenza with a house phone and a spread of daily newspapers forming a tasteful grouping for the executive with a few minutes to kill. After a while a banquet captain came by and placed a small tray with a bottle of spring water and a chilled glass with a wedge of lime on the credenza next to me. He was dark-complexioned and wore a short tuxedo jacket and a crisply pressed shirt.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Our compliments, sir,” he said. “In case you're thirsty.”

I looked at the bottle and then back at him, realizing I was thirsty, that I hadn’t had anything to drink since the eight ounces of Diet Coke on the plane from Memphis, and marveling at the idea that he had known that when I hadn’t. Damn, I thought, the service here was good.

“Thanks,” I said.

“A pleasure.” He nodded, and then moved off down the corridor.

I had only drunk half of the spring water when the board room door opened and one of the board members came darting out. I recognized him by the picture we had on our website—now clearly ten or fifteen years out of date—but couldn’t remember his name. He gave me a quick wave as I came up out of the chair, and then dashed down the hall and into the men’s room. He’d left the board room door open behind him, and I could see other members of the board inside rising from their chairs, stretching their arms, and joking good-naturedly with each other.

From my perspective I could see neither Mary nor Eleanor, but deciding they had finally gone on break—twenty-five minutes late—I ventured into the room, stopping just inside the door, the bright sunshine from a long bank of windows causing me to blink and momentarily shield my eyes. They weren’t just windows, I realized, but full glass doors, two of them slid open and I saw several board members out on a small tile-floored terrace beyond. An infinity of blue sky surrounded their solid forms.

“How was your flight?”

I turned to my right and there stood Mary, dressed in one of her power suits and looking more at home than I had ever seen her in the office.

“It was good,” I said, nodding the hello instead of vocalizing it.

“Any delays?”

“Nope. Smooth sailing, start to finish.”

“And your hotel?”

“It’s nice,” I said, wondering why all the small talk. “What I saw of it, at least. I just dropped my bags and left in order to get over here on time.” I saw Eleanor over Mary’s shoulder, in a conversation with another board member. She was also dressed professionally, her hair recently permed in a style no longer in fashion. “How are things here?”

“They’re nice. Eleanor is very happy with her suite.”

It wasn’t the information I was looking for. I was really asking about how the board meeting was going, but I decided not to clarify because I saw Eleanor break out of her conversation and turn towards us.

“Alan!” she said warmly, stepping forward and shaking my hand in both of hers. “It’s good to see you again. We’re all looking forward to your presentation this afternoon. It looks like another record-breaking conference. Congratulations!”

The effusiveness of her praise took me by surprise. It was true the written report I had submitted in advance of the board meeting had shown us on track to beat last year’s attendance record, but a lot still depended on the on-site registrations. I found myself mumbling something to that effect.

“No worries!” Eleanor said. “With all the hard work you’ve put into this conference, I’ve every confidence that the numbers will come in. It’s one of the few things we can count on this year, eh, Mary?”

Eleanor was still jovial, but Mary’s face paled as if she had been stabbed in the side with a letter opener. Mary’s flat response, I thought, was even more revealing.

“If you say so, Eleanor.”

It sounded nearly insubordinate to me, but if Eleanor thought so, she showed no outward signs. She gave me a smile and a reassuring squeeze on the elbow, and then moved on to another conversation.

“What was that all about?” I asked as soon as Eleanor was out of earshot.

“It’s nothing,” Mary said, her reptilian mask coming back down over her face. “Just stick to your script during your presentation. And during the question and answer period...” She left the sentence dangling, as if waiting for me to confirm that I was listening.

“Uh huh?”

She stepped closer to me, close enough for me to smell her perfume, closer than I was frankly comfortable with, and spoke without pretense.

“Don’t say anything. I’ll field all the questions and, no matter what I say—don’t contradict me. Just keep your mouth shut. Understood?”

“Suuurrre,” I said slowly, knowing this was not the time to ask questions, but curious as all hell as to what was going on.

Mary’s hand came up as if to grasp me, to squeeze my arm as Eleanor had done, to communicate some kind of human feeling that existed below the surface of her words, but Mary’s hand stopped short, hovering in the air like a hawk before falling away. Then she moved past me, weaving around two other board members and out of the room.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz

Here’s the blurb on the back of my paperback copy:

Whether we’re buying a pair of jeans, selecting a long-distance carrier, choosing a doctor, or setting up a 401(k), everyday decisions -- from the mundane to the profound challenges of balancing career, family, and individual needs -- have become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented. We assume that more choice means better options and greater satisfaction. But beware if choice overload: it can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains why too much of a good thing had proven detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being. Synthesizing current research in the social sciences, he makes the counterintuitive case that eliminated choices can greatly reduce the stress, anxiety, and busyness of our lives. In accessible, engaging, and anecdotal prose, he offers practical steps for how to limit choices to a manageable number, have the discipline to focus on the important ones and ignore the rest, and, ultimately derive greater satisfaction from the choice you do make.

It’s a good summary of the book I actually read. But, frankly, there is only one idea worth remembering. When it comes to making choices, regardless of how many options you are given, on balance, you will be more satisfied with your decisions if you focus on the goal of choosing something that is good enough, rather than something that is the absolute best.

The absolute best, you see, is a fool’s errand.

Imagine going shopping for a sweater. You go to a couple of department stores or boutiques, and after an hour or so, you find a sweater you like. The color is striking, the fit is flattering, and the wool feels soft against your skin. The sweater costs $89. You’re all set to take it to the salesperson when you think about the store down the street that has a reputation for low prices. You take the sweater back to its display table, hide it under a pile of other sweaters of a different size (so that no one will buy it out from under you), and leave to check out the other store.

“Maximizers,” as Schwartz calls people who adopt the goal of getting the absolute best, can never be truly satisfied -- because there is never any way for them to be sure that they got the absolute best. There may always be a better choice out there somewhere.

“Satisficers,” on the other hand, have a completely different set of rules.

To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. A satisficer has criteria and standards. She searches until she finds an item that meets those standards, and at that point, she stops. As soon as she finds a sweater that meets her standard of fit, quality, and price in the very first store she enters, she buys it -- end of story. She is not concerned about better sweaters or better bargains just around the corner.

The satisficer is always satisfied, you see, while the maximizer never is. Which one would you rather be?

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

My Top Five Blog Posts of 2019

I've been posting these Top Five lists at the end of every year for the last seven years. Over those seven years, a handful of posts have come to dominate them. Their popularity, it seems, feeds on itself, with more and more people accessing them every year (probably in part because I keep promoting them through these Top Five wrap-ups at the end of each year).

So, for this year I decided to do something different. Here's a look back at the five posts on this blog that received the most page views in 2019 -- excluding those that have appeared on previous Top Five posts.

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1. Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru was the first prime minister of democratic India. His daughter was Indira Gandhi, the woman who succeeded him as prime minister and was eventually assassinated. But as the pages of this remarkable book open, those things haven’t happened yet. The book is a collection of letters, written in 1931-33, when Indira was between 14 and 16 years old, and her father was serving time as a political prisoner.

Partly to help keep his mind active and partly to help his daughter develop an appropriate appreciation for world history, Nehru wrote these letters without notes or other reference materials, relying primarily on his own knowledge and beliefs of what had created and shaped the world around him -- thousands of years of history, from the beginnings of civilization, to the aftermath of the First World War and the initial stirrings of the Second.

And throughout all the letters in this long book, I think it is important to remember that, whatever the reader’s own political and economic beliefs, the words he is reading are the simple and straightforward prose of a loving father writing to his daughter.

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2. The Chief Detail Officer

In a linked TED talk, Rory Sutherland persuasively makes the case that organizations don't spend enough time working on the small stuff. That, in fact, there is a bias in most organizations that big problems have to be met with big solutions--solutions that have to be conceptualized by powerful people and executed with lots and lots of money.

Sutherland doesn't claim that approach won't work in some situations, but he comes out stridently for a different approach, embodied by something he calls the Chief Detail Officer, the CDO. This isn't the person responsible for coordinating all the details. It is the person responsible for finding small things that cost little that have tremendous impact and making sure they are done right and consistently.

I've seen the need for such an approach myself, and can cite at least one circumstance when some small detail meant a great deal to one of my association members.

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3. Closing the Office vs. Working From Home

Unusual winter weather and the changing nature of our technology and connectivity expectations causes me to first rethink and then abandon my association's "office closing" policy.

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4. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

It's one of the many "mini term papers" I tend to offer up, free of charge, to desperate freshman English majors the world over.

My overall theses: This is a story of a boy becoming a man, and the changes he has to go through in order to make that transformation. The boy is named John Grady, and there is an exchange between him and a criminal in a Mexican prison that pretty well describes the difference between boys and men.

The world does not often test the bravery of a young boy. But as he grows and begins to make his way in it, it will test him, and if the boy passes the test, he will no longer be a boy. Regardless of his age—and John Grady is sixteen—if he can stand up to world and hold his own, he is a man.

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5. Closing Time by Joseph Heller

Closing Time, in case you didn’t know, is Heller’s sequel to Catch-22, and I feel pretty much the same about it as I did about Catch-22. I’m glad I read it, but I don’t think I’ll read it again.

It is a book written by an older generation and, I fear, for an older generation. Heller constantly plays with the cultural touchstones of his generation, naming one of his characters Strangelove, and including a curly-haired writer named Vonnegut in several scenes. And like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, Closing Time's protagonist seems to move through time throughout the course of the novel.

It gets confusing, and much would probably be revealed on a close second read. Surely someone (if not Heller himself) has diagrammed the novel, and such an exercise would undoubtedly reveal that the protagonist is both the cause and effect of the novel’s action, with effect probably preceding cause in at least one situation. At least things feel that way.

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My thanks to everyone who has been reading what I've been putting up here. I hope you plan to stay engaged in 2020.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
https://www.fastweb.com/college-scholarships/articles/college-scholarships-2019-edition

Dragons - Chapter 26 (DRAFT)

Have you ever been to Miami Beach?

You have, huh? Which one?

What do I mean? Well, I imagine you didn’t notice, but there are two Miami Beaches. Couldn’t you tell when you were there? What did you go there for anyway?

A convention? Some headshrinker society you belong to, I suppose.

Well, that explains why you didn’t see the other Miami Beach. You know, you’re just like the volunteers in the nonprofit I managed. People like you and them, you fly into Miami—or San Francisco, or Chicago, or wherever your national convention is being held, upgraded to first class, no doubt—and you experience a city very different from the one people actually live in. From the limousine pickup at the airport to the chocolate-covered strawberries waiting in your hotel suite to the top shelf liquor served at the opening night reception on the hotel’s private portion of Miami’s famous beach—or, I suppose, at Museum of Modern Art if it’s San Francisco or the Signature Room at the top of the John Hancock Building if it’s Chicago—you never get to see what’s really going on in the cities you visit, do you? Even though what’s really going on is often going on right there on the street in front of your four-star hotel, just a couple of stories below the crystal chandeliers hanging in the ballrooms where you hold your fundraising dinners and your professional education sessions.

Think I’m kidding? Look, I may not know much about being a father, but I do know about this. I was on the inside, remember? I’m the one who cut the deals with the man behind the curtain to make all the magic happen, who kept people like you in the dark about that other Miami Beach. It’s not all restaurants with dueling movie star chefs and all-night dance clubs filled with beautiful Cuban women and glowing high-rises and celebrity mansions along the Intracoastal Waterway. That’s just the image they put in your mind. That’s what they spend their millions on, making your brain conjure up those illusions whenever you think about Miami Beach, and convincing you it might be fun to go down there and add some of your money to their pot. But it isn’t real. Like every other city on earth there’s a real Miami on which that fantasy is built, where kids go to school and garbage gets picked up on Thursdays and people struggle to get ahead and some percentage of the population inevitably falls through the cracks.

On this trip to Miami, the juxtaposition of it all hit me really hard. Probably because of all the crap I was dealing with at home and at work. It’s never a good idea to travel when you don’t have a stable anchor to ground you.

The plane ride down was uneventful, giving me plenty of time to think about all the things that could go wrong in the week ahead. On a plane full of people I felt more or less alone, because no one from the office was flying with me. I was coming in a day earlier than I usually did, invited to make a special appearance at the board meeting because of my new role in the organization. I stopped in Memphis to change planes and checked my voicemail about a dozen times during the layover, certain that all kinds of hell was already breaking loose and that my mailbox would be filled with frantic messages from staff members and volunteers alike.

Alan, I missed my connection in Detroit. What do I do?

Alan, all the conference materials got shipped to Miami, Arizona, not Miami, Florida. What do we do?

Alan, I just checked in at the hotel and my room is completely unacceptable. What are you going to do?

But every time I checked there weren’t any messages, just the dry and unfriendly computer voice asking me if I would like to leave any. I didn’t trust it. I was positive the voicemail system was malfunctioning—that the messages were, in fact, piling up on the server but that some computer gremlin was keeping them from getting delivered to my mailbox. I even called back to the office to check on the server status, and got a gruff and somewhat insulted Jurgis telling me to keep an eye on my own business and let him keep an eye on his.

It left me feeling disconnected. Things had been so busy for so long, and now here I was in the Memphis airport with nothing to do and no demands on me other than getting on the next flight. It was liberating and frightening at the same time. Part of me wondered what would happen if I never got on that second plane, if I just left the airport and drifted into the rhythm of that great Southern metropolis. I saw myself working by day as a tour guide at Graceland and spending my nights in the blues clubs down on Beale Street. Would anyone from my current life ever find me? Would any of them even try?

I wasn’t serious, just entertaining another dark fantasy, and when the time came I dutifully boarded the flight to Miami, squeezing myself into my coach seat and checking my voicemail one more time before they closed the boarding door.

The cab ride in from the airport is one of the best times to catch glimpses of that other city, the one the people in the mayor’s office and the convention and visitors bureau don’t necessarily want you to see. It’s hard enough for them to create a protective cocoon around their convention district. Blinding you from their blight for that entire trip is next to impossible. I always investigate the neighborhoods I’m likely to be taken through, wanting to know more about the real lives of the cities I visit. And, as expected, to get to my oceanfront hotel, the cab driver took me on freeways overlooking land-locked communities like Allapattah—a name derived from the Seminole Indian word for alligator, now the home for mostly Dominican and Haitian immigrants—and Liberty City—named for one of the first low-income housing projects in the nation, where riots had once broken out over accusations of police brutality. These were places people are moved to and forgotten when expressways are being built and the dreams of developers are being realized.

This time I was by myself, but I’ve made such journeys with my colleagues and volunteers dozens of times before. For them, the twenty minutes in the taxi cab is always catch-up time—talking on the cell phone with people who had left them messages or punching away on their Blackberry keyboards, trying to stay ahead of a never-ending string of email conversations. But for me these trips were a priceless reality check, an opportunity to stare out at the gritty circus that defined most people’s lives and try to put my own privileged existence into perspective.

Whether it was the strip clubs that lined every airport access road, the rusted and broken industrial buildings that surrounded every crumbling interchange, the graffiti-laden billboards for radio stations and beer that flanked every highway, or the boarded-up storefronts that seemed to wall off blocks of dilapidated houses—the trip in from the airport was one giant reminder that the world is filled with haves and havenots. Some people ignore that fact, spending their cab time just watching the meter count up the dollars it will take to reach their destination. Others see the injustice but feel powerless to do anything about it, and fatalistically forget the divide by the time the bellman brings their bags up to their suite on the twenty-third floor.

The hotel I was staying in was nice. Real nice. I wasn’t in a suite and I wasn’t on the twenty-third floor, but it was the kind of hotel that had those kind of accommodations, and I knew several had been offered to our VIP volunteers. It was the headquarters hotel for our national convention, the one where we had reserved rooms at a discounted rate and where many of the conference sessions would be taking place. But it wasn’t good enough for Eleanor Rumford. As I dumped my luggage in my room and placed the do not disturb sign on the door before heading over to the board meeting, I remembered how Eleanor had asked us to reserve a special block of rooms for her and the board of directors at an even nicer hotel up the street. The service is so much better there, she had said, and we’ll have much more productive meetings with their conference concierge seeing to our needs.

“Yes, certainly,” I remember Mary saying when Eleanor had made the request at the end of one of our weekly conference calls. No equivocation at all, no caution that we would have to investigate the cost, that the budget may not support such an indulgence, that no incoming board chair had ever asked for such an extravagance before. Just “Yes, certainly,” and then a nod in my direction indicating that she wanted it taken care of, no questions asked. Of course it was me that had to convey the order to Angie who, in the midst of planning six other meetings, would have to find time to negotiate a new contract with a new hotel, Eleanor breathing down her neck the entire time to make sure we got just the amenities she was looking for.

“The woman is insane,” Angie told me at one point. “She keeps going on and on about how this is the hotel she always stays in when she goes to Miami Beach, about how she gave her first presentation there, and about how it will always hold a special place in her heart. She wants me to get a certain board room for their meetings and a certain suite overlooking the ocean for her.”

“So?” I had said, not needing her testimony to convince me that Eleanor was crazy. All I knew was that Eleanor wanted it and Mary wanted her to have it. “Get it for her.”

“It doesn’t work that way, Alan.” Given the tone of her voice, she might as well have called me numb nuts. “We’re not doing any other business at that hotel, and they have another group in-house during our dates. They’re not interested in keeping us happy, they’ve already landed their big fish. I can give Eleanor anything she wants at our headquarters hotel. We’re going to fill all their sleeping rooms and do about a quarter million in catering there. For Christ's sake, if she wants the whole fucking spa to herself for the weekend, I can make that happen. But I’ve got no pull at that other hotel.”

“Do the best you can,” I had said, knowing there wasn’t much more I could say.

And Angie, using the almighty dollar and Mary’s blessing, got the hotel to release both the conference room and the suite Eleanor had wanted. As I walked the few blocks to the better hotel I could see the balconies coming off its tower—the largest ones facing the ocean on the top few floors—and I shook my head knowing how many thousands of dollars we were paying for the suite Eleanor was staying in, and hoping she was enjoying the view.

The main drag between the two hotels was another study in contrasts—a reminder that the two Miamis existed even here. The east side of the street—the ocean side—was reserved for the over-leveraged high rises and hotels, million-dollar real estate gobbled up for their expansive infinity pools and beachside restaurants. Each complex squatted on an entire city block, lifting its luxury towers into the air so its windows could reflect the dazzling light of both the rising and setting sun. Between these giants sat squalid little swimwear and souvenir shops—places where the paint was always peeling—the kind of places the tourists who were staying in the fleabag hotels on the west side of the street would frequent when they ran out of suntan lotion or wanted to pick up a six-pack of beer, or a trinket or two for the kids to remember their Florida vacation by. Later in my trip, I knew, I would spend a few minutes in one of those dismal shops, looking for something to bring home to Jacob, and fully expecting to give up after finding nothing more meaningful than lucite snow globes filled with dolphins and glitter stars, and giant ballpoint pens with MIAMI BEACH stenciled in plastic appliqué down the side.

When I turned down the street where Eleanor’s hotel had hidden its entrance—the truly best hotels always did that, tucking their main entrances down side streets and adorning them only with simple signs, like corporate law firms that don’t need to call attention to themselves—a salty fresh sea breeze hit me in the face and I caught a glimpse of the sand of Miami Beach itself, a blue ribbon of ocean beckoning beyond. The great expanse of dreams and danger had always been a block away, but now I saw how the buildings—and the hotels, always the hotels—tried to keep it prisoner, as if such a thing could be corralled, and in their attempt only succeeded in keeping certain people from it. Eleanor’s hotel and the building opposite—some kind of art deco condo monolith—formed the walls of a white canyon, with a palm tree-lined street snaking its way between the cliffs and ending in a traffic turnabout and several concrete pylons. This configuration kept all but the most determined pedestrians from wandering out onto the finger-thin patch of public beach access that existed between the privacy fences, terraced decks, full service beach cabanas, and manicured sand that the Goliaths of this world used to parcel out the majesty of the unsounded sea, treating it like any other commodity to be hoarded and sold to the highest bidder.

Except these Goliaths weren’t feared and reviled like that ancient Philistine from the Bible story. Instead, they were where everyone wanted to be. The whole cavalcade of humanity was there—from the American princesses with their silk beach wraps and their rhinestone-studded flip flops to the homeless men with soiled swim trunks and toenail fungus—you could see them both by the dozens on the streets of Miami Beach, sometimes passing each other as if members of the same community, as if they had something more in common than just the desire for what only one of them could afford.

People are the same everywhere you go. Bums asking for spare change, hotel doormen working double shifts to put their kids through college, trophy wives laying out on pool decks with their fake breasts and fashion magazines, and volunteer leaders gathering together in oak-paneled board rooms to make decisions on how to spend other people’s money. Whoever they are, if they go to Miami Beach they want the same thing. They want to be where it was happening, where they can lose themselves in the intoxication of knowing that they are a step ahead of someone else, that they have something someone else doesn’t and never will.

That, in fact, is why there are two Miami Beaches. As sad as it is to say, you can’t have one without the other.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/