Episode 7: Why Bother To Achieve?

Welcome back to wisdom from the aerial view, a podcast dedicated to changing the way we think about living our lives in a peaceful, positive and purposeful way. And in so doing, perhaps changing the world. When we last spoke, we were deep in discussion about death. Very, very hard topic. So now I want to change a little. I want to talk a little about a chapter in your book that is titled Why bother to do anything? So, Dr. Mark Klein, author of this book, why bother?

Good morning, Enid. So nice to see you as always. Yes, so you mentioned that we've talked about the fact that our purpose is to evolve from selfish to selfless, from inward focus to outward focused. So it'd be very easy for somebody to conclude that really all you have to do is

Good morning. I like that.

help an elderly person across the street, go shopping for them, shovel somebody's driveway, since we've had snow here recently, things like that should get the job done. But it's more to it than that. And the real question is, why should we bother to do anything? Why is it important to have, to strive for in a career or any kind of job or become a person of substance by accomplishing things? Why is that important? Well, the short answer, going to get to the long answer in a second. But the short answer is because that's you need to create a persona that is capable of helping other people. So if our goal is to evolve from selfish to selfless and to focus outwardly on other people, in order to do that most effectively, we have to become people of substance. And one of the major ways to do that is to develop a collection of accomplishments, personal accomplishments. So for instance, you have spent your career helping people, mostly feeding people, mostly feeding elderly people or people who have no means. So you know that in order to have done that, you had to remove yourself from the equation. In other words, it couldn't be about Enid. To do this effectively, it had to be about the people you were serving. And to arrive at that, you probably don't realize it, but if you look back on your personal history, you have a slew of accomplishments under your belt that allowed you to believe inside that, yes, I am a person of substance and I am capable of effectively helping other people. So that's a very important concept to say that it's not just enough to help other people because a 12 year old can help other people, but a 12 year old doesn't have the the resume necessary to be most effective. A 12-year-old can mow somebody's lawn next door or she can go to the supermarket and pick up some food for somebody. She can have a lemonade stand. There's lots of things a 12-year-old can do to help other people. But these are relatively small things. I think we'd agree that we're talking about helping people on a much larger and deeper scale. To do that, you have to become a person of substance.

To become a person of substance, one of the major ingredients is to create this catalog of accomplishments, exactly what you've done, which is why you have been so effective in your career in helping people.

Well, I appreciate that. But guess, but let's go back to a concept we talked about several podcasts ago about that, even if you live one day, it might have been a life of purpose. So then the premise that a 12 year old who is shoveling a lawn or groceries notice you had the girls going boy shoveling and the girls going to the grocery store. I don't understand that. That kind of. Yeah. OK.

I knew that was gonna come back at me. Okay, so the girl shovel and the boy goes to the supermarket. I'm sorry. Aren't we done with this by the way? Haven't we moved on from this issue? I hope so. Okay. Okay, fine.

Mr. Chauvinist. So, Correct. so, yeah.

Well, maybe you have, but I haven't. I will always be there. But so there's the question about purpose. So I can have a purpose, depending on the definition, if I'm 12 or if I'm my age, almost 75. All presents accepted. My birthday is next month. So the question then is just a series of accomplishments. I could have accomplished a great deal. And you did certainly at the age of 12. You and I were just talking about. your life when you were 12 and what there were accomplishments. So it's not about longevity. I can have accomplished a great deal in a short period of time. Isn't that correct?

Yeah, so you make it as always a very good point and put me on the spot. You gotta stop doing that without giving me a heads up. is... All right, so it is a legitimate point that you just made about a 12 year old and nobody wants to see a child lose their life, okay, so, but I get your point that yes, college students are relative to age is the point I'm trying to make. So...

I like it. That's why I call you Spot for a nickname. Let's go Spot.

A 12 year old is not going to oversee the creation of a food bank, most likely, right? But that doesn't mean what a 12 year old does relative to his or her age isn't significant. It is. But we're going to, we're really talking about, we're focusing on a more extensive life. Even though, yes, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross did say famously that if you only had one day to live, you could still have a meaningful life. Most people don't live one day. And thankfully, most people, at least in this country, make it out of childhood into adulthood. So we're gonna focus on that, but your point is absolutely legitimate. The way I would answer your question is that accomplishments are age-related. So we expect more from an older person. Here's something I also discussed in the book, I think. When somebody has their first child, especially their first child, and that child reaches around the age of one and takes their first steps. It's a very exciting time for most parents. In fact, I have four kids. I remember my first child's steps. He's the oldest, obviously, but I still remember that more clearly than anything, because it had such an impact on me. And so we praise that child. hooray, you did so great. You walk. Wow, it's so great. Well, fast forward a couple of years and just walking across a room on two legs is not going to impress anybody, right? The standards, the expectations change as we get older. it is age appropriate of what accomplishments are. So why are accomplishments important? What do they do? What's the magic of accomplishments? They build self-esteem. They allow us to feel good about ourselves. We've been living in the last couple of decades where we started to see this switch. When you and I were growing up, back when there was fire and wheels were just invented, Something like that. We were expected to...

Mm-hmm.

to do things to earn praise. Nobody was showering us with praise for doing nothing. My dad, I was exchanging in some emails with a friend of mine, he was telling me about his father's famous expressions. And his father's famous expressions were really kind of paraphrased from famous phrases from many famous people. And they were phrases of substance. My father's phrases were things like, go play in heavy traffic.

You

There's a bus leaving in 10 minutes, be under it. Yeah, right. Or yeah, take a long walk off a short pier, right? These are my father's favorite expressions. And of course, you know, I laughed. I thought they were hysterical. I still think they're funny. But he wasn't, you he praised me, but only if I did something, right? It wasn't like, you there was no, we didn't get trophies for everything. I was in Little League.

Be on it. Be under it.

And I was not the best athlete. could field very well, but I was honestly afraid of the ball. I would get a hit. I would always get a hit my first time up every season because I forgot how scared I was of the ball. And then like three pitches later, I realized, God, it's going to hit me in head. I got like two hits the rest of the thing. Right. Exactly. So nobody said.

Good, you just got a job at the Chicago White Sox. Because they can't hit either.

So nobody, that's great. So nobody said to me, you did such a good job. No, nobody said that to me. I was well aware that I was a batting failure, right? I could feel quite well, but you know, if I made a nice play with my glove, people would say, you know, nice play. if every time I struck out and nobody said, it's okay, you tried your hardest. No, none of that. Well, that's obviously evolved. now, course, I coached a couple of my kids' soccer teams and other teams. And, you know, everybody got a trophy, of course. We don't want hurt anybody's feelings. But the truth is, we know we're not all equal. You could say it up and down, but we know we are not all equal. We're equal. We should be equal in opportunity and rights and freedom and so on. But we are not equal in ability. For instance, there are things that you can do that I couldn't do in a million years. Right. I recognize that. You talked about the Chicago White House White House, Chicago White House. That's interesting. Maybe we should move the White House to Chicago. Anyway, the Chicago White Sox. Anyway, Chicago White Sox. Right. OK, so.

Annie Ribbett here, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

People don't praise the Chicago White House for trying so hard, right? They stink, right?

But people still go to the games. Mm-hmm. Right.

Okay, but it's for fun. But the point is they don't praise the players. you know, like, I'm sure, you know, when I used go to the ballgames with my dad, he'd call everybody a bum. Look at that bum. He struck out again. We didn't praise people for doing, for trying. It's what you succeeded at. It's accomplishments. And accomplishments, of course, take effort. So we've lost that. And by doing so, The unintended consequence of praising people for things they really don't deserve is that not only don't they develop self-esteem, we suck it out of them because they know, I got this promotion. It's a good one. We graduate kids from schools all the time. I was reading about the Baltimore school system recently and if I got this right, I don't think there was a single school that met the standards in the whole city of Baltimore. So, but we're graduating kids left and right in Baltimore and DC, everywhere, you New York, Chicago, everywhere. And these kids can't read and can't do anything. We're graduating them. That's, that is criminal. That is, that is to me outrageous because you're stealing life from these kids, right? You're telling them everything's okay by giving them this diploma and they know it's not. You can't fool people. People know what they've earned and what they haven't earned. And by giving people rewards of any kind, whether it's a trophy on a soccer team or even graduating them from high school or in this era of DEI, of course, the intent has been excellent, but the outcome has been less than excellent because when we do that, People know when they got a job or they've gotten a promotion or something for something other than the quality of their work or their ability. So when you do that to people, you're stealing from them.

If we believe as I think as I do, and I think you do now, that we are on a mission to evolve from selfish to selfless, from inward to outward focused, we have to become people of substance to be able to do that effectively. The analogy I use is like putting on your mask in a plane, the oxygen mask in a plane before you help somebody else. Every time you get on a plane, they go through the whole thing. then the last thing is put your mask on first before helping a child or somebody next to you. This is the same thing. You can't help somebody effectively. You can't be the most effective in aiding others if you're not a person of substance yourself, if you doubt your own abilities, if you doubt your worth and value. And the way to develop worth and value, what we call self-esteem, is to have accomplishments. Accomplishments come in all sizes and shapes. can, you know, people are good at all kinds of different things. I like to say nobody is uniquely ungifted. Unless you have some type of congenital anomaly or some serious defect like that, nobody is uniquely ungifted. You and I, in our lives, have seen people that we thought, we kind of looked at them and, well, he looks like a weird guy or whatever. And turns out he's like a magician with a pencil or something, right? People have gifts that we just can't, we're always surprised, which is one of the reasons I like to say we should judge people favorably. Another topic for a future discussion. But... People have talent. Sometimes they're unexpected. Sometimes they don't realize it for a while. But everybody has the ability to get good at something. And if I were giving a young person advice, and I do frequently, it's get good at something. It doesn't matter what it is. Find what you like, find what you have talent in, put the effort in, get good at it. It could be an activity or it could just be becoming knowledgeable about a subject. For instance, you probably know more about senior hunger and hunger generally in this country than 99.9

of people in the country. So if I had a question about it, which I do sometimes, I ask you, what's the story with homelessness, Enid? What's the story with this idea of hunger in the world, in the country? And you'll tell me, well, it's not what I thought. We had this conversation about this recently. So everybody has this ability, and we need to encourage people to do this. That's how we build significant personas.

So let me ask you this, because in this particular chapter, you also talk about confidence. How do we build confidence? So I will talk about a little. Excuse me, when I started my career in this world of working in the anti-hunger movement, I think I was a great imposter. I didn't know what I was doing, I know I talking about, but I was doing it. But I needed the confidence to keep going. So we're talking about youngsters and that everybody's getting a trophy and all of that. And I get it. And I think I agree with you that it's probably not a good thing. But let's talk then about how do we build the confidence of that child who might not. You're on the ballpark and your first time at bat, you did great. But then all of a sudden you remembered, oops, I'm afraid of the ball. OK, how do I build your confidence enough to get back into the batter's box? when the next time comes around when the ninth player has already batted, you're now your number one batter, you go. How do I build your confidence without saying, here's a trophy for that number one hit you got? What do I do?

Well, the worst thing you could do is give me a trophy. I'll tell you that because I know I stink. Right. So you can say anything you want, but I know I stink. So for what I would say is to say to that child, and this, this is not just for children. This works for everybody. That you are not alone. Look around this ball field. There are 20 kids here, right? 18 of them are afraid of the ball. Right. So how do they, how about the other two? The other two have decided, eh, I've been hit by a ball before. These kids aren't throwing the ball so fast. They're only 10 years old. It won't hurt that badly. Don't worry. If you get hit, you'll be okay, but keep trying and you'll, and you'll do it, but you have to work at it and take batting practice. Come early to the, to the team practice. Stay late at the team practice if you can. When you're at home, swing a bat. Have your mother or father, your brother or sister or friend throw a ball that you can hit. Practice. So you have to give people tools. You can't say, it'll be okay. No, that doesn't work. It's not going to be okay. So the first thing is to say you are no different than everybody else. And I want to come back to that idea in a second. And then the second is give them the tools to succeed. Practice more. Look, you know, let me help you with your technique. Again, everybody's afraid of the ball. I'm going to throw the ball at you and hit you with the ball. I'm not going to throw it hard, but you'll see it really doesn't hurt that badly. You don't have anything to be afraid of. You have to give them tools to succeed. Words are not enough. That's why this... milieu in which we find ourselves, where we're rewarding people for things that they don't deserve, it's criminal. It doesn't work. It diminishes self-esteem. It does not increase self-esteem. You are not helping anybody. You know, in my practice, I saw a lot of people, obviously I saw a lot of people in general, but I was always honest with patients. If they had a particular problem, whether it be their weight, something else,

I would discuss it with them. I wouldn't make believe it didn't exist. You don't help people by not telling them the truth. You A, tell them the truth and then B, you give them the tools to improve their situation. just criticizing isn't enough. You got to give them some tools. And like for the kid on the baseball field, you know, the things I talked about, practice, technique, you know, I'm going to throw the ball at you. I won't hurt you. You'll see what it feels like. Things like that to give them the tools to move forward. So these are the things that move people forward. Everybody wants to have self-esteem. Have you ever met anybody that says, I like feeling crappy about myself? I haven't, have you? Okay, so if we love people, and you and I love people, then you have to help them. And the way to help them is to empower them, not to paint over their issues and saying, it's nothing, it's okay. No, you tell them the truth and then you assist them by giving them tools.

No, absolutely not.

But how does, and I think it's obviously a great thing and I agree with it. The question then is how do I help someone overcome obstacles? I mean, we all have obstacles in our way. And I think when we talking a lot in this podcast about try to overcome our own angst, we're all anxious. We're living in a very anxious world right now. And a lot of it has to do with the obstacles we all have to overcome. We have to, in order to get to that place, to view the things from the aerial view, we have to get over some of the obstacles. Do we not?

Obstacles? We do. Right.

think it's the other way around. So let's go to the aerial view first. The whole concept of the aerial view is to keep your life, to give you a perspective of your life and the world that is empowering, that is calming, that creates some degree of tranquility and peace. So when you learn to ascend to the aerial view, to become that disinterested observer and see the whole thing, then you realize, then you see your life in context and realize, that what is the worst thing that could happen to anybody? If I were to say to you, what's the worst thing that could happen? You would probably say, I could die. I think that's what most people would say. Death is probably the worst thing that could happen. But the bad news is it happens to everybody. So that's a really super powerful clue. If you cannot avoid death, then why are we afraid of it? It should not be a factor in our decision-making in the way we behave.

Yeah, I would. Yeah.

What we should say is, okay, I'm running up against a barrier. There is a barrier there. I'm gonna hit it. That's the last day of my life. That's the last record I'm on. I'm going to hit that barrier. I don't know when, I don't know the time, place or circumstance, but I know it's gonna happen. Okay, let's stop worrying about that, because it is going to happen. Sure, people say, I want it to happen as late as possible, but as we've already discussed, that's probably not as important as we think it is. Again, leaving out children, I never want to see any, you know me, I'm super, what's the right word? I'm a little bit mushy, right? I'm a little bit mushy in a sense. Yeah, I'm kind of a crybaby, that's true. So when it comes to kids especially, I want to see them healthy, I want to see them live. And so we're going to try and leave them out of the conversation forever if we can. But.

You're a crybaby. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

So you know you're going to run up against this barrier. Okay, take that off the table. Stop worrying about that. It's an assured thing. We live our lives. We've talked about this as if if we make every right decision, we won't hit that barrier. We'll go right through it. No, you're not going through the barrier. It's going to stop you. So take that off the table. All right. Then if you don't mind, I'd to return to. the jukebox metaphor yet again, it's something we already discussed, but it's been weighing on my mind since we discussed it on one of the previous podcasts. And that is that when we look at the jukebox of time, which shows us all the records, all the moments of time in its entirety, and we realize from the aerial view, we are on a small, tiny sliver of records. They're very important. because that's why we're here. We're here for a particular reason, to prepare, I believe, to make that evolution from selfish to selfless, from inward to outward focus. So the fact that we're on a limited number of records is not a big deal. That's fine. And we worry, we get upset about the idea of what happens when we hit that barrier, that last record, because after that, we're not on any of the records going forward. We're not on any of the records in the future. And that's why we fear death, that we're not gonna be here anymore. But to return to this discussion we had previously, we also weren't on any of the records before the day we were born. And there's about 14 billion years of universe before that. None of us ever thinks I'm so sad that I wasn't around in 800 or 2000 BC. or my parents weren't, or my siblings weren't, or my friends weren't. I've never heard anybody lament the fact that they weren't on the records before the day they were born. But from the aerial view, it is clear that there is absolutely no difference between the moments before you were born and the moments after you die. They are equivalent.

It is in our mind that we have this special, we imbue these days after our death with more significance than the days before we were born. That's a misinterpretation of life. It's a misinterpretation of the universe and our significance in it. We should be just as concerned, if we're gonna be concerned, then we should be just as concerned as the ones before the days or those records before we born as the ones after we die. We shouldn't be concerned about any of them. That's the point. If we're not going to be concerned about the ones before we were born, which we shouldn't be, we should also not be concerned with the ones after we die. All we need to focus on are the ones that we're on to our lifespan from the moment the record that marks the day of our birth to the record that marks the day of our death. Those are the ones we worry about. OK, so why am I here? We've discussed. that there is a purpose, there is a reason we're here. We've talked about some of those clues about our backwards lives and history and so on. Okay, let's focus on the records we're on. We know this is a limited time engagement. I gotta make the most of it. So if I, again, I don't try and sell anybody my ideas. they think they're worthwhile, they should embrace them. And if they don't, they're perfectly willing to ignore them. I've been ignored plenty of times in my life.

Excuse me, didn't hear you because I've been ignoring you. What were you saying? Sorry. Go ahead.

You're the best. You see, now you've confused me. So, okay, if there is a purpose, and whether you agree with my purpose or not, we clearly have this limited lifespan. And so I believe we're here to make that evolution. To make that evolution from selfish to selfless, we have to become people of substance. That's the reason we need to have accomplishments. That's the reason we need to build our self-esteem. It's as simple as that. That's why we bother.

And that's the reason we have to, why we bother. Is that what you're talking about? That's why we bother.

That's why you should strive to become good at something. To become, I'll tell you, the most satisfying thing is to become excellent at something. I won't say expert at something, because experts, experts is a little misleading. Just because somebody calls themselves an expert doesn't mean they really know anything. and I'm, yeah, and I'm like exhibit A, right? So.

Yes, watch television, everybody's an expert. Yes.

I would never call myself an expert, but you should try and become really good at something. Why? It's gonna make you feel fantastic. There is nothing better than to become excellent at something. It doesn't matter what it is. It could be woodworking, it could be baking, it could be a career like doctor, lawyer, could be electrician, could be the best plumber, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. That sense of, know how to handle this. I can handle this, I know what to do. is fantastic. That creates extremely high self-esteem. And then you're ready to turn around and change that camera focus to other people. Because now you are a person who's confident, because you asked about confidence. That's where it comes from.

Share it. Yes. Right. So again, it's not just about me becoming good at something or even excellent at something. If I am, then it's to share that, to give someone else, I don't know, some of my wisdom or whatever, the goodness that I've had, the luck that I've had in my life. And we ought to talk about luck. Does luck play? Let me ask you question. Does luck play a role in any of this?

goodness. In something, let me just go back to what you said just now. It's that the reason you want to become excellent and become a person of substance is not so much that you can impart what you've learned about that to somebody else. Like you've been a CEO of a nonprofit, a couple of them, and if I needed somebody to run a nonprofit, I'd call you, right? I'd say, Ian, help me pick a person to do this. You know what? OK. But It's because you're a person of substance. doesn't matter what you become great at. You can help people in so many ways at that point because you've developed a confidence to recognize that you don't have to worry about yourself. You've reached that point where you're not worrying about yourself. You can now turn your focus to assist others. That's the point. In terms of luck, luck is all over the place, but that's only in the street view, right? Luck's only in the street view. There's no luck in the aerial view. And so you keep luck in perspective. I'll give you an example. So there are 4 million books published in the United States every year. And probably 20 of them, maybe. I don't know the number. Do really, really well. How many super successful authors are there? You know the names, right? But there are 4 million books. You know like a handful of names in 4 million books. How come those other people?

Tell me about that. Tell me about that.

didn't get famous. Oh, they weren't as good writers. No, some of them were way better writers. Some of their stuff is way better. They just didn't catch on. They didn't have the right people. They didn't have a platform. They didn't have 100,000 social media followers. They weren't a celebrity, whatever it is, right? The people that made it got lucky to a certain degree. They're good, but there's lots of really good writers out there. The fact that only 20 of them do really well, that's luck. But we don't have to worry about that because that's not why we're here. We're not here to become the New York Times number one bestseller. I mean, I've tried four times, I'm 0 for 4 at moment, but I'm not upset about it. I recognize that's okay, that's fine. As long as I'm doing the best I can to move the ball forward, to help as many people as I can, that's all I have to worry about. I can't control the rest. That's, you know, that's ephemeral. That's... You don't know what's going to happen. Sadly, as we record this podcast, there's these horrendous, terrible fires out in California, and movie stars are losing their houses. It's awful for anybody to lose their home, but just because to show you, nobody's immune from the world, right? So that's not what counts. How famous you are, how successful you are, how rich you are, don't really matter. It's the person you become to build that persona, that level of self-esteem and confidence that you can go out, turn that camera around, and go help other people.

And that's what we're finding. You brought up that the fires, we're finding that people are helping other people. We're pretty good. We are rising from the ashes. Okay. We've had a great discussion today and I thank you again for this. And I'd like to conclude the podcast today. And I want to end actually with a direct quote from the last paragraph in the chapter that we've been discussing today called, Why Bother to Do Anything? You say, and I quote, overcoming obstacles, and accumulating accomplishments are not burdens we must endure. They are opportunities to advance, embrace them, for they are the medium through which we arrive at wisdom. Thank you for those words. Thank you for being on this podcast. And thank you for challenging us to overcome obstacles, to overcome things that we thought were insurmountable and making us understand that we really do need to bother. Thanks. We'll see you next time.

Thank you, Ine. Thank you, everybody.