Outside, which is where human biology evolved, everything is constantly moving. You would be hard-pressed to find a bird, fish, land animal, or insect not in motion. Grass, plants, and trees sway in the wind. Even light, guided by the sun, moves throughout the day. It is no wonder those of us who lead sedentary lifestyles indoors, far removed from our nature, develop all kinds of chronic conditions, like ADHD, depression, and myopia.

If you read history, it is abundantly clear that mental health issues have always plagued our species. They may be more widespread today due to lifestyle, but the main difference between then and now is the level of seriousness and intelligence with which they are being addressed.

When I was a kid, I always identified with the hero in movies. Nothing could be more natural. The hero is portrayed as a sympathetic character. The hero’s perspective dominates the narrative. The hero is the good guy. Villains, on the other hand, typically aren’t given much of a platform. Attention is paid to their background and psychology only when it condemns them for being the way they are. Villains are always wrong. And if you identify with the villain, then something is wrong with you.

Villains often lose their status as such when their side of the story is told.

Today I am still typically persuaded that the villain filmmakers have invented is more or less in the wrong. The villain simply doesn’t stand a chance against complicit costumes, makeup, dialogue, disturbing music and the occasional smoke. But I also realize that life is more complicated than a hero-villain binary would let on. The most realistic villains are normal people motivated by a sense of grievance. They learn to resent those they deem responsible for their plight and lose faith in the institutions they represent. Sooner or later this process leads to a desire to get even. In the extreme, destructive, anti-social behaviors manifest. How many people say that they have lost faith in their political system due to a sense of grievance? This is a dangerous sentiment because in it lies a seed of revolution. The same seed that villains nurture in response to an offense.

A prime example of this comes from the movie 300. Ephialtes of Trachis was a deformed man whose parents ran away from Sparta, a huge no-no in that culture. Ephialtes hoped to redeem his father’s honor by returning to Sparta and serving in Leonidas’s army. However, he was quickly turned down by Leonidas himself for being too weak to raise his shield. Leonidas said to Ephialtes, “If you want to help in a Spartan victory, clear the battlefield of the dead, tend the wounded, bring them water. But as for the fight itself, I cannot use you.”

Rather than accept a downsized role, Ephialtes reacted by informing the Persians of the Anopaea, a path that only the locals knew. This treasonous act that gave the Persians a tactical advantage was motivated by revenge. Had Leonidas accepted Ephialtes in the Greek army, the outcome of the story would obviously have been very different. In reality, however, his noble intentions turned sinister. The truth is there is both a hero and villain inside every man. The one that triumphs is the one that gets nurtured the most.

Today there are countless wars being fought around the globe. And there are many interests being represented. Leaders notoriously demonize the opposition in motivating their side to support a conflict. It’s a lot easier to kill villains than ordinary people with differing interests. You know the expression, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” To be clear, I’m not saying there is a moral equivalence in every conflict. There isn’t. What I am saying is people tend to portray their enemies as evil even when there is no often appreciable difference in morality between the two sides.

[You can follow me on Twitter @creatorvilla.] Sometimes the emotional scars of living become so wrapped up in our identity that we cannot conceptualize life without them. It takes a tremendous amount of strength to process emotional trauma. In fact, I would say this is one of the great challenges of life that all must face sooner or later. Make no mistake—I’m talking about death, divorce, injury, disease, abuse, a breakup, and you can fill in the blank. Nothing can eradicate the pain of loss, but wisdom can be the difference between staying stuck in the past for a lifetime and finding the strength to move forward after a period of grief.

I’ve transcribed a poignant clip in which former US Navy Seal Jocko Willink addresses the topic of emotional pain in a way that only he can. (You may remember him from his July 4 feature last month on discipline equals freedom.) In the clip, Willink responds to a man who wrote-in about losing a child—obviously one of the worst traumas anyone could ever go through. However, much of Willink’s insight into pain has universal application. For example, Willink analogizes pain to waves, and I cannot think of a better metaphor. No matter how absolute and all-encompassing pain may feel at times, it is not the absolute truth. It is a wave—a true but partial expression of the sum total of who we are.

I’ve never experienced the loss of a child, and I can’t imagine how difficult that is. But one thing I do know from experience—the more courage with which I “ride the wave” of whatever it is I’m going through, the faster it tends to let up. And what emerges from that process is a stronger, more compassionate version of myself.

Transcript:

My wife and I suffered three weeks of turmoil, which included losing a child. How do I expedite that moment when we pick up ourselves–basically how to push through?

So the pain that’s going to come, it’s going to come in waves. At first, you won’t even notice that they’re waves because all the waves are going to be so close together, it’s going to feel like you are drowning in sorrow. You’re not going to get any air, and you’re not going to be able to escape that sadness.

That’s what the waves feel like at first. And then at some point there’s going to be a little break, just a little break. Just a little bit of light in the darkness. Something is going to make you smile. Something is going to make you laugh. Something is going to show you just a little bit of light.

And then another wave of pain is going to come back again, and it’s going to be strong, and you won’t have any control over it. All of a sudden, you’re going to be just crying uncontrollable. You won’t be able to say, “No, no. I’m in the light now. I’m smiling right now. I’m not going to go back there.” No, you’re not going to be able to control it, and that’s scary. You’re at the mercy of this ocean of sorrow.

But don’t let that scare you. Don’t let that scare you ’cause I’m telling you that that wave is going to subside again, and this is going to go on. It’s going to go on, and the waves–they will become weaker. And what you need to realize is just because the waves are becoming weaker, this doesn’t mean that you love your child less or you miss them less or that you aren’t crushed at their passing. It just means that you’re starting to be able to deal with it, which is what you’re supposed to do.

When you feel a little bit of a break, what you can do is you can row the boat. You can row the boat, and what I mean by that is start doing something productive to get your mind moving forward. Let’s sort out the drawers in the bedroom. Let’s vacuum. Let’s do something productive. If there’s something that distracts you, that’s fine. Do it. Let there be some calm in the water.

As the calm comes, also you’re going to find moments where it’s like you can have things that are going to bring all of the waves. And that’s OK, too. Bring on the waves. Go look at the pictures. Write down the memories. Read the letters. Read the notes. Read the emails. Remember, and then there’s that standard service. You’re going to do the memorial. You’re going to do the burial.

And when that’s over, let a little bit of more time go by. Give yourself another week of washing around. Of feeling that sorrow. Of letting the waves toss you around in the ocean.

But after another week, what you do is you go and you write a letter. You write a letter to your child, and you explain to them–explain to them how much they mean to you. Explain to them how heartbroken you are that they are gone, and then explain to them why you are going to carry on. And explain to them how in losing them, you have learned without a shred of doubt, how truly precious life is. And that they have taught you the immeasurable value of your own life and your family’s life.

And explain to them that you know. That you know that they loved you, and that you know that they would want more than anything for you to be happy and productive and impactful in the world. And explain in that letter, what you will do to make them proud by how you live your life.

Then take that letter, go to their grave, and read it to them. Then cry and kiss their soul. Tell them that you will see them on the other side. Then go–live your life. And those waves are still going to come, and there’s going to be pain, and there’s still going to be sorrow, but you go and live your life. Live it well. And make them proud.

[You can follow me on Twitter @creatorvilla.] Have you ever chased after something that didn’t satisfy you? We’ve all been there before. We set goals, and we achieved them, only to discover that they weren’t what we needed after all. Materialism is one of the most common values responsible for inspiring deficient life goals. If all we have to live for is a bigger house, car, or nicer pair of sneakers, then we are unlikely to ever experience true fulfillment.

Per his Wikipedia, Johann Hari is a Swiss-British journalist. He has written for syndicated publications including The Independent and The Huntington Post. Hari is author of Chasing the Scream: The Opposite of Addiction is Connection and Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression — and the Unexpected Solutions.

Today, I’ve transcribed a clip from The Joe Rogan Experience in which Hari expounds on the emptiness of materialism. He explains that there are two kinds of motivation in life–intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from the enjoyment of an activity itself, while extrinsic motivation is transactional–we perform the activity to get something else out of it. An example of intrinsic motivation is playing piano because you love piano. An example of extrinsic motivation is playing piano to please your parents or impress a girl.

Hari argues that the more extrinsically motivated we are, the more likely we are to experience depression and anxiety. Our culture, he laments, is overrun with extrinsic motivation in the form of people-pleasing, image-conscious behaviors–a manifestation of junk values. Junk values, Hari argues, are exacerbated by social media. According to Hari, the remedy for junk values is knowledge. By educating people on the art of happiness, people will develop intrinsic values more in line with their well-being. More controversially, Hari suggests that top-down ad regulation is another importance piece of the puzzle, and idea that Rogan pushes back against on the grounds that it violates free speech.

Check out the thought-provoking video and transcript, and let me know where you stand down below.

Transcript:

Hari: Nobody had ever scientifically investigated this until an incredible guy I got to know called Professor Tim Kasser, who’s at Knox College in Illinois. And Professor Kasser made some really important breakthroughs in this. There’s two ways–everyone listening to your show has two kinds of motivation in their life–we’re all a mixture of both. Imagine if you play the piano in the morning because you love playing the piano–it gives you joy. That would be what’s called an intrinsic reason to play the piano. You’re not doing it to get anything out of it, that’s the thing you love. Jiu Jitsu is like that for you, writing is like that for me. Everyone will have something in their life that gives them joy as they do it, right.

Now imagine you play the piano not because you love it but because your parents are massively pressuring you. It’s their dream for you. Or at a dive bar that you can’t stand to pay the rent. Or to impress a woman. That would be what’s called an extrinsic motivation to play the piano. You’re not doing it because that thing gives you joy, you’re doing it to get something further down the line. Now obviously we’re all a mixture of both, but Professor Kasser showed a couple of really interesting things.

Firstly, the more you are driven by extrinsic values, the more your intrinsic values are starved, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious by quite a significant amount. He also showed as a culture, as a society, we have become much more driven by these junk values. We’ve become much more driven–think about how Instagram makes you feel. We’ve become much more driven by this hollow external sense. . .

A little while ago it was Elton John’s last night at Caesar’s Palace, an amazing thing to be at, and about half the room is filming it–not even looking at Elton John, just watching it through their phone. That’s a small example, but you can see what they’re doing. In order to display their life, to invite envy from other people, they are not living their life. No one wants to watch your sh*tty video of Elton John. There’s thousands of videos of Elton John that are much better than yours. Why are you doing that? You are never going to watch it either. You are doing it to say to other people, “Envy me.” It doesn’t make you feel good in that room, it actually makes you feel worse. You’re not enjoying the experience, and it makes them feel like sh*t because you’re trying to invite envy in your friends.

That’s a small example of a much wider thing, of a kind of junk values that have taken over. The reason that relates to what you’re asking about Brazil is that Professor Kasser has shown that there’s two sets of solutions to these junk values that have taken over our minds. One is–it’s like f*cking air pollution–get the messaging out of your head. More 18-month-old children know what the McDonalds M means than know their own surname, their own last name. Professor Kasser put it to me–from the moment we’re born, we’re immersed in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life. None of you listening to this will lie on their death beds and think about all the sh*t they bought and all the likes they got on Instagram. They’ll think about moments of meaning and connection. That’s like a banal, obvious thing, but we’re constantly pushed to not think in those terms, to think about show it off, buy, spend. These junk values have taken over our minds, so part of the solution is just f*cking get rid of most of this advertising, get rid of most of this very tightly regulated. . .

Rogan: But in doing so, you limit commerce, you’re limiting people’s ability to sell things. You’re changing the current market that a lot of people don’t have any problem with.

Hari: I know this is a heresy in the United States, but limiting commercial speech is fine by me.

Rogan: I think it’s fascinating, I think it’s a fascinating discussion, but in a sense it’s limiting free speech as well. And we have a real problem with that. The problem with it is as soon as you start to put any regulations at all. You say, “You shouldn’t be allowed to advertise,” even if it’s advertising honestly about a great product, people will have real issues with that.

Hari: We already have advertising regulation. You can’t put an ad saying “I’ve found the cure for cancer.”

Rogan: That’s what I’m saying, honestly.

Hari: I would argue this is a tightening. For example, in London there was a controversy a little while back. There was a billboard of an impossibly hot woman and an impossibly hot man, and the billboard said something like, “Are you beach-body ready?” The clear implication being if you don’t look like these people who you’ll never f*cking look like, you’re not ready to go to the beach. And the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said you can’t do this.

Rogan: But that’s so silly. I mean it’s not an unobtainable ideal, you’re looking at two examples of it. They’re real human beings. Look, I’m not saying that you have to be that way, but if you do want to look that man and have that body, it is a possible goal.

Hari: It’s not possible for the vast majority of people.

Rogan: If they don’t have the time or the effort, it’s not. But very many people have radically changed their body. I’m not saying that you have to do it, I’m not saying you should do it. But it is a possible thing to do. And if you’re trying to sell fitness, wouldn’t you sell an example of someone who’s really good at it. Like if you’re trying to sell a business course, wouldn’t you show a guy with a giant house and a Ferrari. This is a guy who’s done really well at business. Look at his penthouse apartment overlooking Manhattan. You wouldn’t say, “Well, that’s an impossible goal. I’m going to show you a person in a middle-class suburb because this is as good as you’re going to get.”

Hari: I think that’s a fair point. I think there are two things going on, isn’t there. There’s the freedom of people to market what they want to do, and there’s. . .

Rogan: It’s a nanny-state issue that people have a problem with. By saying these are impossible-to-achieve body goals. . .

Hari: We already have regulation of these things. And people don’t call that a nanny-state thing.

Rogan: We have regulation, but I don’t think this is a good example.

Hari: What’s a better example–Professor Kasser said there’s two sets of solutions to these junk values problems. There’s “Get the contaminants out of the atmosphere sort of thing,” which he says is actually a weaker one than the second set of solutions. So how do we stop people being pumped full of bullsh*t values. .

Rogan: Educate them on what is happening to them and make it less appealing.

Hari: And this is the second part. And you’ve got to what I think was the most important part of the research that Professor Kasser did. He was working with a guy called Nathan Dungan–who I interviewed. Nathan is a financial advisor in Minneapolis, and his job was to work with adults who were having trouble budgeting, and explain budgeting to them and help them do it. And he gets a job from a school. It was a kind-of middle class school–wasn’t super rich, wasn’t poor, it was middle class, where they’re having a problem. The kids at the school we’re becoming obsessed with getting like the latest Nike sneakers or the latest iPhone or whatever it was. And if the parents couldn’t afford it, the kids were really freaking out.

So they said to Nathan, would you just come in and explain budgeting to these kids. So Nathan goes in and he tries to explain budgeting, and he quickly realized these kids don’t give a sh*t about budgeting, there’s something else going on here. They are so obsessed with getting these things. So with Professor Kasser, he designs this program that led to a really interesting breakthrough, and it’s something people can try at home. You don’t have to do it in this context. And you can do it just as adults, but they did it with parents and they’re teenagers.

They come in, once every couple of weeks, for I think 4 months. The first meeting they had, they just said, “Write a list of everything you have got to have.” They didn’t define that. And people, of course, say like a home, a car, whatever. But quite quickly people would say Nike sneakers. The parents would name expensive things. “Tell me how you would feel if you got these Nike sneakers.” And very rarely, I don’t think any of them were like basketball players where it was like “I need to jump,” or whatever, if that’s the right phrase. Almost immediately they would say, “I’d be accepted by the group. People would envy me.” These insights are just beneath the surface. Who put that idea in your head? Where did you get that idea? Of course, everybody thinks they’re smarter than the ad, but giving people the ability just to see how hollow those junk values are–that was the first part.

The second part was much more interesting and took longer. Then they would have in future sessions–they’d say, “Given that has not actually made you feel better, what are moments in your life when you have felt satisfied, happy, in a flow state? What are things that are meaningful to you?” A whole range of things. Playing sports, playing music. Reading–whatever it was. They said, “How can we build more of that in to your life and less of these junk values? How could you do more of this every week and just meeting–we don’t have these conversations in our culture very often–just meeting once every couple of weeks and checking in with each other.

Actually I managed to play guitar for an hour every day. I managed on Saturday to take my kid to the beach, and we went.

Rogan: That’s going to stifle materialism?

Hari: What it led to, monitored by Professor Kasser, it led to significant shifts in people’s values. They had a significant decrease in junk values, and a significant increase in more meaningful intrinsic values. And we know that that correlates with lower depression and anxiety over time. The weird thing is I sometimes feel like with both of my books–Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections–I sometimes feel like I’m giving people permission to know the thing they already know.

There’s a famous segment on SportsCenter entitled “Why We Love Sports.” It consists of inspiring and memorable highlights like an incredible catch, a big come-from-behind victory, or an athlete making the wish of his #1 fan come true. Today I want to address the same question–why we love sports–but from a different angle. In this post I address a reason behind the popularity of sports that may surprise you.

Over the years, I’ve cut out many activities in the interest of becoming the best version of myself, but sports is not one of them. Sometimes I’ll watch sports with my friends or in a foreign language for added benefit, but I’m not against watching sports by myself. People say that watching sports or other repetitive TV adds little measurable value to one’s life. After all, the inventory of sports is infinite–you can never “catch up” or “be ahead of the game.” It’s easy to spend an entire today absorbed in matches that quickly become irrelevant. And if you were raised around sports, you can already converse about them with little time spent actually watching the game. However, there’s a benefit to watching sports that transcends the highlight reel and the pop culture savvy, and it is has to do with human psychology.

Life is a delicate balance between order and chaos. Chaos is the natural state that everyone is born into and that exists apart from human institutions. It’s a state of discomfort, insecurity, and fear. Chaos is the absence of order. Bringing order to the world is the goal of every progressive activity. Order creates comfort, security, and confidence–order is ultimately what people are after.

Let me illustrate the difference. Chaos is sleeping outside in a tent in a predator-rich environment not knowing what your next meal is. Order is having a roof over your head with AC and a pantry full of delicious food. Chaos is the first day of a new job in a new city with unfamiliar people and technology. Order is day 250 of that same job. Order is going out with friends and family. Chaos is going out with total strangers. Order is being married to someone for 10 years. Chaos is when that someone passes away or the relationship stops working. You get the point.

Not all chaos is bad. We need a measure or chaos to progress. Too much order and you may get complacent. When someone tells you “get out of your comfort zone,” what they mean is you need a little more chaos in your life. Chaos that can stretch you and grow you into a better person. The problem is that some of us are way beyond the chaos threshold for growth. Too much chaos has become an obstacle to growth and leaves us feeling uncomfortable and insecure. What we need in life is more order.

What does any of this have to do with sports? Sports, simply, are a source of order in the world (in other cultures, family, society, and religion play an outsized role). Sports are highly predictable despite some uncertainty over the outcome. We know how much time each game lasts; we know how many players are on each team; we know how the mechanics of the game work; we know the rules and violations; we know how players are expected to perform; and we know how players and spectators are expected to behave. “Why We Love Sports” is all about chaos. But the majority of games ending in chaos, and the entirety of games ending predictably, are defined by the order of the sport itself. There is no room for chaos in sports outside the confines of the game.

Sports add order to people’s lives. Sports give people a space where their expectations about what is going to happen can be met. And the more professional the competition, the more this is so. To be sure, order isn’t the only reason people love sports. There’s community and connection; there’s the fond memories of playing the game recreationally or as a child; there’s the knowledge that “anything can happen”; there’s the big money and real life drama; and there’s the sheer amazement of seeing the product of talent and countless hours of hard work on display.

Order, however, is the one benefit that people experience but do not rationalize. And that’s the gap I’ve hoped to bridge in this article.

Sammy Rangel’s life gave him every reason to be angry, bitter and resentful. And for a long time, that’s exactly what he was. Physically and sexually abused as a child, Rangel ran away from home at age 11 and joined the Maniac Latin Disciples. He spent years engulfed in a life of violent crime, lengthy prison sentences, drug abuse, and promiscuity. Rangel took the first step toward transforming his life with the help of a prison drug rehabilitation program and soon after his release started working for a Safe Streets Outreach Program in Wisconsin. In 2011, he co-founded Life After Hate, a non-profit whose mission is to help people leave hate groups. He is the author of Fourbears: Myths of Forgiveness. According to its description on Amazon, the book is “a graphically illustrated guide from tortured child, to remorseless beast, to healing and change.”

I first heard Rangel’s Ted Talk over a year ago. It was powerful and inspired me to stop making excuses in life. There are a few mottos I like to repeat. One of them is, “If he can do it, I can do it, too.” Other people’s testimonies can sometimes help us recognize that many of our limitations are self-imposed. If Sammy Rangel, who was barely given a puncher’s chance, found the strength to move forward in life, what’s holding you and me back?

Recently, I stumbled across the same video and was surprised to find that there was no transcript or subtitles available. The talk is 22 minutes long and is a lot longer than most content of its kind on this site. That said, I was willing to spend hours transcribing it because I believe it is a message that can help people heal. Resentment, they say, is like drinking a poisoned cup and waiting for the other person to die. Forgiveness, on the other hand, is strength. It makes life better every single time.

Keep reading, and I’m confident you will get something out of Sammy’s testimony.

What I have learned is although the details of our lives may be different. The underlying process of getting stuck or suffering in our parts of life is the same for all of us. We do not have to be victims of our experiences or in the way that we tell our stories. But interestingly enough, stories are the only way out. And it is us who create those stories. We hold the power to change our stories and what they represent. I invite all of you to consider if it would serve you well to create a new story and a new path. And to please remember that the things that held you down will one day hold you up.

Sammy Rangel

Transcript:

Today what I’m going to share with you is a difficult story for me to talk about, and it may be difficult for you to hear. I was 41 years old when I discovered that my mother had killed my brother Renee. I was sitting in my office waiting to see the next patient. I had about 3 minutes before that appointment started. And when I read the article and this news came to me–it said that my mother had beaten my brother with a Tonka truck when he was 20 months old. At that time, that article was dated January 5 of 1969 and my mother would have been about 5 months pregnant with me. The email went on to say that my brother had died at 19 as a result of his injuries. He had permanent brain damage, partial paralysis down the side of his body, and the article said that he was losing consciousness and bleeding out of different places from his body. As I was sitting there, what I imagined myself–what I wanted to do, what I knew I was capable of, was getting up, taking off my suit coat, walking to my car, finding where I knew my mother would be, and taking her life.

At this stage in my life I had obviously overcome a lot of the abuse, a lot of the neglect and torture that she had put me through, but for some reason I was more angry at this than anything I had experienced previously. And it became quite apparent that at some point, my family had conspired to keep this secret from me over 41 years. It was just a twist of fate that I was able to discover this news. So I knew I had about those 3 minutes to pull myself together because I knew then, even though I wanted to, I was not going to get up, I was not going to drive toward where my mother was out, and I was not going to kill her. What I was going to do was pull myself together so that I could meet my responsibility to the next patient coming into my office. But in those 3 minutes I relived quite a bit of what she had done to me.

I was 3 years-old when my mother left me and my sister with her brother. And I can remember him motioning to me to come to him through a mirror that laid or rested on his bedroom doorway. When he was calling me in, I knew I didn’t want to go in there, but I felt powerless. And so I found myself next to the bed. He was naked. He was fat. He was ugly to me. And behind him I saw my sister crying. And even though I shouldn’t have understood what was happening, I did understand what was happening. And he pulled me on to the bed, and at that point my sister tried to defend me. She was just a couple years older than me at that time. And I remember him threatening her, that if she didn’t shut up that he would kill us both. And then he raped me. On the same night that he raped my sister.

Eventually we told my mother what had happened to us at the hands of her brother, and she did worse than nothing about it. She continued to make us show this man affection and respect. We had to spend time with him. We had to sit on his lap. We had to kiss him on the cheek when we greeted him. And this happened over many years. When I got that message, I realized that my mother had picked up with me where she had left off with my brother.

By the time I was 8 years old I had already tried to kill myself for the first time. Oftentimes, I wasn’t allowed to eat. I wasn’t allowed to sleep. I wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom. And I had other siblings, and quite often the beatings I was taking could be happening right here and my siblings could be watching TV, or playing, or talking as if nothing was going on a few feet from them. The scars you see on my head are not from other men, are not from the streets. These are scars I [have] because as they would cut my head open with objects, as they were hitting me, I didn’t get to go to the hospital to have stitches or to get my broken bones fixed.

A part of the abuse was deep humiliation. A part of her cruelty included not being able to use the bathroom. And I would often have to walk around in my underwear in front of my siblings and family because she didn’t want me to be able to sneak food into my mouth or into the bathroom or into the basement when I went to go do chores. And so there was no hiding the fact that eventually if I needed to go to the bathroom and they wouldn’t let me, I would eventually sh*t and p*ss on myself. And if I did that, she would often make me take my underwear off and put them in my mouth, and then put her hand over my mouth so that I couldn’t throw-up, I couldn’t spit it out. And if I had the nerve to throw up, she would punish me even more.

I reached a turning point at 11, just after my birthday. I remember on this occasion I had snuck out of the room. I used to have to kneel next to her bed, and I remember crawling very quietly on the pattern on the floor that I discovered wouldn’t creek as loud as I snuck out in the middle of the night. And I found myself back in the room standing over her with a knife. And I was debating killing her, but there were 2 reasons that I remember that prevented that. One, I was afraid. I don’t think I was born to kill. And the other is I loved my mother deeply despite all that abuse, and I couldn’t bring myself to do that. And so I made a choice. I made a choice to leave. To run away. And that was a pretty big event because as a result of the abuse, I had no friends. I had no sleep-overs. I had no one in the community that I could go to. I was going into a completely unknown, unfamiliar, isolated space in the world.

And it didn’t take long. Within that first year, I was having sex. I was drinking. I was smoking. I was doing cocaine. I was in a gang. I was violent and aggressive, carrying weapons. I had dropped out of school and right before I turned 12, me and my 11-year old girlfriend buried our first child together. When we went to the hospital while she was in labor, they put me in a room by myself. And eventually a doctor opened the door and he rolled in a table, like a medical table, and on this table was a blue napkin that looked a lot like a tablecloth. And there was something underneath there. And then he left and he closed the door behind him. I had a feeling that I knew what was under there, but your mind can’t quite grasp it just yet. And eventually I got up and I lifted the paper towel and there was my dead son. He had been dead 2 days before she gave birth to him, and so his body was already starting to decompose. He was green and black and other colors that nobody should have to see on a baby. And his head was like a balloon filled water, it was just lop-sided and laying on the table. And there was no one there to talk to me about that or to process that or to make sense for me.

And I walked out of that hospital and I remember feeling less like a runaway and more like a throwaway. I felt that no one would be there to help me process or to understand my life or these experiences. And I remember moving from being scared to being angry. And I expressed that anger through violence. I escalated the type of violence. Before I was fighting but it was more defensive, now I’m choosing to be aggressive. Now I’m choosing to start fights. Initially when I went to the streets I remember there was a situation where a man asked me to participate in a murder. As he was killing someone he asked me to finish. And I couldn’t bring myself to that. But now after this situation, I felt like I wanted to kill, I felt like I wanted to hurt someone. And I remember me and my friend, we picked a homeless person–an innocent victim–and we beat him up and I tried to kill him that day. He had done nothing to us but it was my expression.

Eventually, that led me to going to prison as an adult at the age of 17 years old. And I was sent to prison not for the crime I actually committed but because of how terrible a teenager I was before I became an adult because the crime they sent me to prison for was usually considered a minor crime but technically it was enough to send me away. And I ended up in a maximum-security prison because I was fighting all the time, I was talking crap all the time. I had no problem cussing you out or trying to pick a fight. For the record, I wasn’t a very good fighter, but I was wiling to fight.

This prison that I walked into had a pretty hostile climate. I walked into racial tension between the whites and the blacks. And very soon after arriving there, a race riot kicked off. And it was the white against the blacks, and as a minority I had to side with the blacks if I was going to join the fighting. And we were quite outnumbered. There was about 10 of us willing to fight and about 30 of the men that we were going to be fighting. And we knew it was clear which side you were on. I myself had 2 knives in my hand, and the whites were armed with knives and spears and metal chairs and mop ringers–you name it, anything that could hurt or maim you. And the order was given to start fighting.

As we started fighting and we’re all trying to kill each other at this point, a guard came in much like on a cat-walk [a runway or ramp] like you see up here. And from above he started shooting and when he shot, everyone ran. But unfortunately my position–my escape was between the whites and the door out. And so my back was against the wall. And eventually the guard who came in to start shooting left again, and that signaled another round of fighting. And those white men came to get me–I’m doing my best to fend them off. An acquaintance–if you can call another person in prison such a thing–saw that I was isolated and cut off, and he joined the fight to help protect me and to help me find a way out. And at that point, that guard came back in and another shot rang out.

I looked to the side and I saw my friend who had joined was shot in his side–had a rather large hole. He was laying on the ground, the whites ran back to their cells. And I remember the guard yelling at me that if I were to touch him, he would shoot me too. But at this point, I had no fear, I had no sense of danger. My friend was screaming, and the ironic thing is that I have two knives in my hand, and I’m looking at a group of men who are armed. And yet they shot him because he was black. I grabbed my friend and I dragged him 150 cells to the other side of the building that I was in. And it was immediately apparent that the guards were not going to allow me or him to go to the hospital. No one in, no one out is what they said. And I asked several times and when it was clear that there were going to allow him to die, I started fighting with the guards. And then other people came out to help me, and we eventually took over that cell hall and took the keys from the guards and we forced our way to the hospital that was in the prison. By that time, my friend had already passed away.

I spent the next 28 months in segregation and isolation for that but because of my courage, or my role, in that prison riot. I started to gain more respect and more power through my gang. Almost immediately from the hall 28 months after spending that much time in the hall, I was released to society. I remember going in as a street punk, a kid who was just loud-mouthed and willing to fight to now I’m still loud-mouthed and willing to fight, but now I have power, now I have authority, and now I have embraced hate, not just anger. And when I embraced hate I was willing to kill for any reason. And I’ve always said, I had more animal in me than human at that time.

So it’s no surprise that just a few months later I was on my way back to prison in another state for even more violent crimes. As a gang leader at this point walking into that prison, I was able to take over and take control of prisons rather easily. I was able to have guards beat up or inmates beat up. I had access to resources that others would find hard to get. And eventually that led to me more encounters, and while I was in that prison system I beat up 4 more guards. And I spent approximately 5 years out of the 7 that I stayed there in segregation and I was transferred 17 times.

And what was ironic to me was that on one of these occasions, a man had said he felt he was in danger for his life because of my presence. And so they came and got me in the middle of the night and put me on the bus and were transferring me to another prison. And when I got to that prison and as I’m walking off, the security staff recognized me and then told the bus driver and their staff “This man cannot come here. We’re not equipped to take him here.” It is one thing to be locked up for many years, and it’s another years to be kicked out of the well completely. When a man is rejected even from prison, where is there left go? And so it was a deeply shaming and humiliating experience in many ways.

At some point, I was forced into a treatment. And at this point, I thought I could go into this treatment, outsmart myself, and outsmart the people there who were meant to give me help. I was willing to play the game because I was willing to fight for the carrot on the end of the stick, which was an earlier release than if I didn’t do the prison program. So I said, “I’ll go there, I’ll play this game.”

In the process of treatment, I remember my counselor asking me in front of my peers to talk about my mother. This struck me as very odd, I had not talked about my mother since I ran away from home, and had no desire to. And he pressed me, and when he asked me to do that, almost with the first word came the tears. I described all that abuse, all that neglect, all of the times she made me go to school smelling like urine, all of the times she had pulled patches out of my hair, all of the times she had left wide open gashes and cuts on my body. I had no problem expressing that.

And then he did something very strange. He took a chair, and he put it in front of me. And he told me to imagine that my mother was sitting in that chair. He said “What would you say to her if she was sitting here?” I was like I don’t want to talk to her. And he pressed me, and as I thought about what I would say, I remember saying “How could you do this to me? How could you do this to us? Why did you do these things?” But of course no answer came.

And then he pressed me further. He asked me to sit in the chair. I had no desire to sit in that chair. Did not want to empathize. Did not want to understand her perspective. I wanted to hate her and blame her. And I felt wholeheartedly justified in that stance, in that position, because much of what she had done was unforgivable if you asked me. But I did. I looked back at my chair, and I racked my brain what would she say. The only thing I could come up with was “I’m sorry.” Here I am in my late 20s still trying to see her as a human being underneath all that hate. Then he asked me to go back to my chair, and he asked me how I was feeling. And I expressed all those feelings of being a victim, being abandoned. Being brutalized, being unloved, unseen, invisible to her and to everyone else in the world.

And my turning point came with this next question: “Sammy, have you ever hurt anyone the way your mother has hurt you?” Since then my life has been one long apology. To my victims. To my siblings. To my children who I had abandoned at this point. Including my enemies that I felt had deserved whatever I did to them. And as you can see, getting to this point is still very difficult to talk about. I didn’t want to mess up my final point, so if you bear with me I’d like to read it to you to make sure that it comes across clear. I feel that this is the most important part of this message:

What I have learned is although the details of our lives may be different. The underlying process of getting stuck or suffering in our parts of life is the same for all of us. We do not have to be victims of our experiences or in the way that we tell our stories. But interestingly enough, stories are the only way out. And it is us who create those stories. We hold the power to change our stories and what they represent. I invite all of you to consider if it would serve you well to create a new story and a new path. And to please remember that the things that held you down will one day hold you up. Thank you.

The world is more connected now than ever before. Within seconds we can get in touch with people from different cities, states, countries, and continents. Some of us even use technology to communicate with people in our own home. It’s rare to go an entire hour without checking one’s phone, and even more rare to prefer ordinary conversation over text-messaging. Most of us, however, can identify a trade-off between quantity and quality of relationships. The more connected we are, the emptier we seem to be on the inside. Anti-social media and constant connection with the masses keeps people from forming the few deep relationships that are vital to emotional health.

Sherry Turkle is a Harvard PhD in Sociology and Personality Psychology and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Turkle has studied the impact of technology on human relationships since the topic first became relevant. In 2011, she published Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.

Turkle recently gave a Ted Talk that has garnered over 5 million views in which she elaborated on these themes. If I had to summarize it in one sentence, I would borrow the following quote: And what I’ve found is that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don’t only change what we do, they change who we are.

Check out the complete transcript of the talk, which I have reposted with permission from Ted!

Transcript:

Just a moment ago, my daughter Rebecca texted me for good luck. Her text said, “Mom, you will rock.” I love this. Getting that text was like getting a hug. And so there you have it. I embody the central paradox. I’m a woman who loves getting texts who’s going to tell you that too many of them can be a problem.

Actually that reminder of my daughter brings me to the beginning of my story. 1996, when I gave my first TEDTalk, Rebecca was five years old and she was sitting right there in the front row. I had just written a book that celebrated our life on the internet and I was about to be on the cover of Wired magazine. In those heady days, we were experimenting with chat rooms and online virtual communities. We were exploring different aspects of ourselves. And then we unplugged. I was excited. And, as a psychologist, what excited me most was the idea that we would use what we learned in the virtual world about ourselves, about our identity, to live better lives in the real world.

Now fast-forward to 2012. I’m back here on the TED stage again. My daughter’s 20. She’s a college student. She sleeps with her cellphone, so do I. And I’ve just written a new book, but this time it’s not one that will get me on the cover of Wired magazine. So what happened? I’m still excited by technology, but I believe, and I’m here to make the case, that we’re letting it take us places that we don’t want to go.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile communication and I’ve interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, young and old, about their plugged in lives. And what I’ve found is that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don’t only change what we do, they change who we are. Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would have found odd or disturbing, but they’ve quickly come to seem familiar, just how we do things.

So just to take some quick examples: People text or do email during corporate board meetings. They text and shop and go on Facebook during classes, during presentations, actually during all meetings. People talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you’re texting. (Laughter) People explain to me that it’s hard, but that it can be done. Parents text and do email at breakfast and at dinner while their children complain about not having their parents’ full attention. But then these same children deny each other their full attention. This is a recent shot of my daughter and her friends being together while not being together. And we even text at funerals. I study this. We remove ourselves from our grief or from our reverie and we go into our phones.

Why does this matter? It matters to me because I think we’re setting ourselves up for trouble — trouble certainly in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection. We’re getting used to a new way of being alone together. People want to be with each other, but also elsewhere — connected to all the different places they want to be. People want to customize their lives. They want to go in and out of all the places they are because the thing that matters most to them is control over where they put their attention. So you want to go to that board meeting, but you only want to pay attention to the bits that interest you. And some people think that’s a good thing. But you can end up hiding from each other, even as we’re all constantly connected to each other.

A 50-year-old business man lamented to me that he feels he doesn’t have colleagues anymore at work. When he goes to work, he doesn’t stop by to talk to anybody, he doesn’t call. And he says he doesn’t want to interrupt his colleagues because, he says, “They’re too busy on their email.” But then he stops himself and he says, “You know, I’m not telling you the truth. I’m the one who doesn’t want to be interrupted. I think I should want to, but actually I’d rather just do things on my Blackberry.”

Across the generations, I see that people can’t get enough of each other, if and only if they can have each other at a distance, in amounts they can control. I call it the Goldilocks effect: not too close, not too far, just right. But what might feel just right for that middle-aged executive can be a problem for an adolescent who needs to develop face-to-face relationships. An 18-year-old boy who uses texting for almost everything says to me wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”

When I ask people “What’s wrong with having a conversation?” People say, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with having a conversation. It takes place in real time and you can’t control what you’re going to say.” So that’s the bottom line. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body — not too little, not too much, just right.

Human relationships are rich and they’re messy and they’re demanding. And we clean them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection. We short-change ourselves. And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring.

I was caught off guard when Stephen Colbert asked me a profound question, a profound question. He said, “Don’t all those little tweets, don’t all those little sips of online communication, add up to one big gulp of real conversation?” My answer was no, they don’t add up. Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information, they may work for saying, “I’m thinking about you,” or even for saying, “I love you,” — I mean, look at how I felt when I got that text from my daughter — but they don’t really work for learning about each other, for really coming to know and understand each other. And we use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves. So a flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for self-reflection. For kids growing up, that skill is the bedrock of development.

Over and over I hear, “I would rather text than talk.” And what I’m seeing is that people get so used to being short-changed out of real conversation, so used to getting by with less, that they’ve become almost willing to dispense with people altogether. So for example, many people share with me this wish, that some day a more advanced version of Siri, the digital assistant on Apple’s iPhone, will be more like a best friend, someone who will listen when others won’t. I believe this wish reflects a painful truth that I’ve learned in the past 15 years. That feeling that no one is listening to me is very important in our relationships with technology. That’s why it’s so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed — so many automatic listeners. And the feeling that no one is listening to me make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.

We’re developing robots, they call them sociable robots, that are specifically designed to be companions — to the elderly, to our children, to us. Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for each other? During my research I worked in nursing homes, and I brought in these sociable robots that were designed to give the elderly the feeling that they were understood. And one day I came in and a woman who had lost a child was talking to a robot in the shape of a baby seal. It seemed to be looking in her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation. It comforted her. And many people found this amazing.

But that woman was trying to make sense of her life with a machine that had no experience of the arc of a human life. That robot put on a great show. And we’re vulnerable. People experience pretend empathy as though it were the real thing. So during that moment when that woman was experiencing that pretend empathy, I was thinking, “That robot can’t empathize. It doesn’t face death. It doesn’t know life.”

And as that woman took comfort in her robot companion, I didn’t find it amazing; I found it one of the most wrenching, complicated moments in my 15 years of work. But when I stepped back, I felt myself at the cold, hard center of a perfect storm. We expect more from technology and less from each other. And I ask myself, “Why have things come to this?”

And I believe it’s because technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable. And we are vulnerable. We’re lonely, but we’re afraid of intimacy. And so from social networks to sociable robots, we’re designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. We turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control. But we’re not so comfortable. We are not so much in control.

These days, those phones in our pockets are changing our minds and hearts because they offer us three gratifying fantasies. One, that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; two, that we will always be heard; and three, that we will never have to be alone. And that third idea, that we will never have to be alone, is central to changing our psyches. Because the moment that people are alone, even for a few seconds, they become anxious, they panic, they fidget, they reach for a device. Just think of people at a checkout line or at a red light. Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved. And so people try to solve it by connecting. But here, connection is more like a symptom than a cure. It expresses, but it doesn’t solve, an underlying problem. But more than a symptom, constant connection is changing the way people think of themselves. It’s shaping a new way of being.

The best way to describe it is, I share therefore I am. We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings even as we’re having them. So before it was: I have a feeling, I want to make a call. Now it’s: I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text. The problem with this new regime of “I share therefore I am” is that, if we don’t have connection, we don’t feel like ourselves. We almost don’t feel ourselves. So what do we do? We connect more and more. But in the process, we set ourselves up to be isolated.

How do you get from connection to isolation? You end up isolated if you don’t cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don’t have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we’re not able to appreciate who they are. It’s as though we’re using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we’re at risk, because actually it’s the opposite that’s true. If we’re not able to be alone, we’re going to be more lonely. And if we don’t teach our children to be alone, they’re only going to know how to be lonely.

When I spoke at TED in 1996, reporting on my studies of the early virtual communities, I said, “Those who make the most of their lives on the screen come to it in a spirit of self-reflection.” And that’s what I’m calling for here, now: reflection and, more than that, a conversation about where our current use of technology may be taking us, what it might be costing us. We’re smitten with technology. And we’re afraid, like young lovers, that too much talking might spoil the romance. But it’s time to talk. We grew up with digital technology and so we see it as all grown up. But it’s not, it’s early days. There’s plenty of time for us to reconsider how we use it, how we build it. I’m not suggesting that we turn away from our devices, just that we develop a more self-aware relationship with them, with each other and with ourselves.

I see some first steps. Start thinking of solitude as a good thing. Make room for it. Find ways to demonstrate this as a value to your children. Create sacred spaces at home — the kitchen, the dining room — and reclaim them for conversation. Do the same thing at work. At work, we’re so busy communicating that we often don’t have time to think, we don’t have time to talk, about the things that really matter. Change that. Most important, we all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits. Because it’s when we stumble or hesitate or lose our words that we reveal ourselves to each other.

Technology is making a bid to redefine human connection — how we care for each other, how we care for ourselves — but it’s also giving us the opportunity to affirm our values and our direction. I’m optimistic. We have everything we need to start. We have each other. And we have the greatest chance of success if we recognize our vulnerability. That we listen when technology says it will take something complicated and promises something simpler.

So in my work, I hear that life is hard, relationships are filled with risk. And then there’s technology — simpler, hopeful, optimistic, ever-young. It’s like calling in the cavalry. An ad campaign promises that online and with avatars, you can “Finally, love your friends love your body, love your life, online and with avatars.” We’re drawn to virtual romance, to computer games that seem like worlds, to the idea that robots, robots, will someday be our true companions. We spend an evening on the social network instead of going to the pub with friends.

But our fantasies of substitution have cost us. Now we all need to focus on the many, many ways technology can lead us back to our real lives, our own bodies, our own communities, our own politics, our own planet. They need us. Let’s talk about how we can use digital technology, the technology of our dreams, to make this life the life we can love.

Thank you.

I have penned a handful of articles on love because I think it is an important topic. And I’m not talking about a romantic sentimental kind of love, although that’s a good thing in and of itself. I’m talking about the kind of love that empowers people to accept themselves, to accept others, and to fulfill the golden rule–do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is what the world needs more of, and I will gladly promote it any day of the week. I’m also not alone. British-born Simon Sinek is a motivational speaker and leadership expert. He is the author of Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action, a New York Times best-seller. In it, he makes the case that of the two main ways to influence human behavior–manipulation and inspiration–inspiration is the more powerful, more sustainable option. I’ve transcribed a YouTube clip in which Simon Sinek talks about the importance of love to successful leadership and successful living Love is a process, he argues, but it works every single time.

Transcript:

Do you love your wife? “Yes.” Prove it. What’s the metric? Give me the number that helps me know. Because when you met her, you didn’t love her, right? Now you love her. Tell me the day the love happened. It’s an impossible question. But it’s not that it doesn’t exist. It’s that it’s much easier to prove over time. Leadership is the same thing. It’s about transitions. If you were to go to the gym, it’s like exercise, right. If you go to the gym and you work out and you come back and you look in the mirror you will see. . . nothing. And if you go to the gym the next day and you come back and you look in the mirror, you will see. . . nothing. Clearly there’s no results, can’t be measured, it must not be effective. So we quit.

Or if you fundamentally believe that this is the right course of action and you stick with it like in a relationship. I bought her flowers and I wished her happy birthday, and she doesn’t love me. Clearly I will give up. That’s not what happens. If you believe there is something there, you commit yourself to an act of service, to the regime, to the exercise. You can screw it up, you can each chocolate cake one day, you can skip a day or two. It allows for that, but if you stick with it consistently–I’m not exactly sure what day–but I know you’ll start getting into shape.

And the same with the relationship. It’s not about the events. It’s not about intensity. It’s about consistency, right? You go to the dentist twice a year, your teeth will fall out. You have to brush your teeth every day for two minutes. What does brushing your teeth every day for two minutes do? Nothing. Unless you do it every day twice a day for two minutes. It’s the consistency. Going to the gym for nine hours does not get you into shape. Working out every day for 20 minutes gets you into shape.

So the problem is we treat leadership with intensity. We have a 2-day off-site, we invite a bunch of speakers, we give everybody a certificate. [claps] You’re a leader. Those things are like going to the dentist. They’re very important. They’re good for reminding us or getting us back on track, learning new lessons. But it’s the daily practice of all the monotonous little boring things like brushing your teeth that matter the most.

She didn’t fall in love with you because you remembered her birthday and bought her flowers on Valentine’s Day. She fell in love with you because when you woke up in the morning you said good morning to her before you checked your phone. She fell in love with you because when you went to the fridge to get yourself a drink, you got her one without even asking. She fell in love with you because when you had an amazing day at work, and when she came home and had a terrible day at work, you didn’t say “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but let me tell you about my day.” You sat and listened to her awful day, and you didn’t say a thing about your amazing day.

This is why she fell in love with you. I can’t tell you exactly what day, and it was no particular thing you did, it was the accumulation of all those little things that she woke up one day. It’s as if she pressed a button, she goes “I love him.” Leadership is exactly the same. There’s no event. There’s no thing I can tell you you have to do that your people will trust you. It just doesn’t work that way. It’s an accumulation of lots and lots of little things that any one by themselves is innocuous and useless. Literally pointless by themselves. People will look at little things that are good leadership practices and will say “That won’t work.” And you’re absolutely right. But if you do it consistently, and you do it in combination with lots of other little things like saying good morning to someone. Looking them in the eye.

My friend George who’s a 3-star general in the Marine Corp. He says his test for leadership–and I love this–his test for a good leader, if you ask somebody how their day is going, you actually care about the answer. The number of times we’re walking to a meeting, we’re rushing, we go “How are you?” “Not Good.” “I got to get to you later, God, I’m late for a meeting.” If you asked the question, you were standing there and you’re listening to the answer. It’s those little innocuous things that you do over and over and over and over that people will say “I love my job.” Not “I like my job.” I like my job means “Yeah the challenge is great, they pay me well, I like the people.” I love my job means “I don’t want to work anywhere else. I don’t care how much somebody else is willing to pay me. I’m devoted to the people here. And I care desperately about the people here as if they’re my family.”

In business, we have colleagues and coworkers. In the military, they have brothers and sisters. That’s how they think of each other. If you really have a strong corporate culture, the people will think of each other like brothers and sisters. “It’s like a family [sentimental voice].” No– brothers and sisters. Deep love. Fight, but the love doesn’t go a way. Bicker, the love doesn’t go away. And I’ll fight with my sister, but if you threaten my sister, you’re going to have to deal with me. We’ll fight internally. We’ll bicker with each other. But nobody’s going to hurt each other. And if anything from the outside shows up, you’re looking at a unified front.

Now how do you create brothers and sisters out of strangers? Common beliefs. Common values. Parents, in other words, executives who care about their children’s success. Who care to raise their children, teach them skills, discipline them when necessary. Help them build their self-confidence, so that they can go on and achieve something more than you could have ever imagined achieving for yourself. That’s leadership. An absolute love and devotion for the people who have committed their lives to this enterprise. It’s a human thing. Just as you know how your body feels after a good workout and you know how your body feels after a big greasy meal. You know that one is good for you and one is not, despite what it may taste like.

And that’s the problem with short-term gains. They feel really good in the short term. We’re highly, highly trained social animals. We’re highly adapted social animals. We can feel social awkwardness. And we can feel when things are going well. You can sense it. You say you have this sense of laughter around me. We don’t walk around with blinders. Like I said, we’re made to do this, that’s why we can assess if somebody’s trustworthy or not. That’s why we keep our walls up–“Yeah, his results are great, but I wouldn’t trust him.” As opposed to letting down your guard, “I trust her with anything. I trust her with my kids, my money, anything.” So we’re highly attuned animals, so we’re good at sensing it.

But I will say there is a caveat to your metric of laughter, which is a decent one. It’s that scale breaks things in human beings. I’ve said before, we’re not made for populations bigger than about 150-ish. It’s called Dunbar’s number. Robert Dunbar, a professor from Cambridge University, theorized that we can’t maintain more than about 150 close relationships. The way he defined a close relationship is if you’re at a bar with a bunch of friends and somebody comes in, would you ask that person to join you or not. It’s about 150 that we would ask them to come join us. And if you think about the reason that actually makes perfect sense. Which is two limiting factors–one is time. If you only gave 2 minutes to every person you know, you’d make no close friends. And the other one is memory. You just can’t just remember everybody.

And so this is where leadership becomes very interesting because if you have a company that has a lot of people–5,6, 7, 800, 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 people–clearly you can’t know everyone. And clearly as a CEO, you’re like “I care about every single one of my people.” You don’t even know–some of the people who work for you are bastards. You don’t care about them. So it’s a nonsense statement.

But what you can say is I desperately care about the people whose names I know and whose faces I recognize. And I care desperately about my leadership, and I instill in them every day that I will give them the tools and I will take care of them with one purpose, and one purpose only: that they will take care of the people in their charge. And I want those people to take care of the people, and instill in them that they take care of the people in their charge.

By the time you get down to the masses where the actual thousand exist–because the seniors are like 20–where the real thousand exists. They feel–about 150 of them can look to one of their direct leaders, one of their direct managers, and say that person cares about me. That’s our boss. That’s my boss. That’s my leader. Not the leader. [Not] it’s the CEO. It’s my manager. My boss. My leader.

Sometimes you get fired. Sometimes you get in trouble. Sometimes you’ll lose your job and the next guy will get all the credit. It’s all true. The courage to do the right thing in the face of overwhelming pressure–only the best leaders have that courage. Only the best leaders. And here’s the folly, courage is not some deep internal fortitude. You don’t dig down deep and find the courage. It just doesn’t exist. Courage is external. Our courage comes from the support we feel from others.

In other words, when someone–when you feel that someone has your back. When you know that the day that you admit you can’t do it, someone will be there and say “I got you. You can do this.” That’s what gives you the courage to do the difficult thing. It’s not going off to an ashram [monastery] by yourself somewhere for four weeks and coming back and finding the courage. It’s not what happens. It’s the relationships that we foster. It’s the people around us that love us and care about us and believe in us.

And when we have those relationships, we will find the courage to do the right thing. And when you act with courage that, in turn, will inspire those in your organization to also act with courage. In other words, it’s still an external thing. That’s what inspiration is. I’m inspired to follow your example. Those relationships that we foster over the course of a lifetime will not only make us into the leaders we need to be and hope we can be, but they’ll often save your life. They’ll save you from depression. They’ll save you from giving up. They’ll save you from any negative feelings about your own capabilities, your own future. When someone just says “I love you.”

Today’s post is a contribution from my friend Souad Tello, who is a Syrian refugee currently living in Turkey. Recently, she shared with me a poignant poem she wrote in Arabic with themes of love, loss, heartbreak, separation, and nostalgia. I liked the poem so much that I translated it into English. No poetic translation, especially this one, can do the original justice. But I hope it can communicate a fraction of the beauty of the original, which I have entitled “Life is Nostalgia.” Below you can also find two audio recording by Souad of the original Arabic and English translation.

One of our readers once shared the following quote: expression is the opposite of depression. It goes without saying that art can be a powerful means to expel negative energy.

Nostalgia [no-stal-juh]: a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life, to one’s home or homeland, or to one’s family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time.

Source: Dictionary.com

Life is Nostalgia (By Souad Tello) (Translated by Ben Peters)

The night comes. . with the moon in its embrace, mourning our sorry condition. . confused clouds, only occasionally visible to the eye. . a treacherous cold breeze after a violent heat. . the world spins around us. . as we stand firm in our place. . we cannot help but remember. . they departed. . they left our wounds to fester with blood. . and our eyes to wander through the labyrinths of the past in search of them. . because they were the source of our hope and confidence. . with a word or two they destroyed the worlds inscribed in our hearts . . with cold indifference they left like it was nothing. . the cold breeze returns. . the mourning moon. . and confused clouds, robbing sleep from our eyes. . with them they compel us to watch the threads of the past cloaked in sorrow. .

يأتي الليل . . وبحضنه قمر باك على حالنا . . غيوم حائرة . . تارة نراها وتارة لا . . نسمات برد غادرة بعد حر ثائر . . والدنيا تدور بنا . . وما زلنا واقفين بأمكنتنا . . مصرين على التذكر . . ذهبوا . . تركوا جراحنا تلعب بالدماء . . وأعيننا تائهة بمتاهات الماضي تبحث عنهم . . أجل إنهم من كانوا آمالنا من كانوا موضع ثقتنا . . بكلمة واثنتين دمروا عوالم كانت مخطوطة في قلوبنا . . وبلا أي مبالاة كان الفراق أسهل ما أمكنهم . . تعود نسمات البرد . . القمر الباكي . . والغيوم الحائرة وتسرق النوم من أعيننا . . لتجبرنا على السهر معها نشاهد أشرطة الماضي المغلفة بالأسى . .