How come so many people have a hard time getting high? I get high reading a good book or watching a raccoon. In fact I am feeling high most of the day. One must be pretty desperately bored with life to snort bath salts. I just read an article about this in the New York Times.
And so many people seem to have no sense of self-preservation: I would not take an aspirin without looking up "aspirin side effects" on google. I trust doctors, yes, but I still double check any medication they prescribe to me. Nobody cares as much about your life as you do, and there is a risk with any medication. So, bath salts? Stuff you buy on the street from people who know nothing of chemistry? How one can trust a dealer just passes my comprehension.
But then, I am just an old woman. A happy old woman.
Showing posts with label teens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teens. Show all posts
Monday, July 18, 2011
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Two good books for Teens
Most great writers are jerks; you know this if you go to book talks or listen to C-SPAN. They have lots of excuses but the fact remains. So, it is a real pleasure to recommend good books written by good people, even more because good books for Teens are so rare:
1)Chris Gardner: Start where you are
Gardner puts just as much effort telling you what could make you successful as he did to raise himself out of poverty. The book is well organized and full of examples and can reach any teen searching his way. There is sincerity in every page which I appreciated because most books about success are filled with fillers, truisms and half-truths. There is real experience here and a constant effort to lay down the rules. Buy the book and leave it in the living room: it will find its way to the teens living with you.
There are a few things that Gardner does not much talk about: part of what made him, and because it is part of him, he does not realize how important it was to his success. First is his constant curiosity: he is curious of other people, of what makes them tick, of what is going out in the world. I think that it is pretty hard to be successful if you go in life mentally blind to the world around you.
Second is his immense capacity to do dull work. There is nothing as discouraging as cold calls in business: you call people you do not know to sell them something, 99 percent of the time, they hang up on you, and that is when they do not insult you, so your capacity to be rejected has to be pretty good to go on doing it. Now Chris Gardner, when he started, decided to give 200 calls a day. Superman does that! Suppose you tell a class of teenagers that if they do it for a year, they will have a comfortable position in life, how many would still do it after three days?
Third is his capacity to admire: Gardner is able to learn from anybody: poor or rich people, nice people or not: if there is something useful to him, he will take the lesson with him and remember it.
These three characteristics define more than Chris Gardner, they define many successful people from different horizons like Mark H. McCormack (What They Don't Teach You At Harvard Business School) or Quincy Jones. Quincy authored the most beautiful biography, but it is not for kids.
Curious, hardworking, able to admire others and learn from them: that what makes not only successful people but heroes.
2) John Grisham :Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer Grisham has written a thriller for teenagers which is intelligent, taut, full of indirect advice and delightful. Of all the successful writers or legal thrillers than I read, Grisham is the only one who always wonders what is the right thing to do: this is something any teen should be interested about, and it is the subject of this book.
1)Chris Gardner: Start where you are
Gardner puts just as much effort telling you what could make you successful as he did to raise himself out of poverty. The book is well organized and full of examples and can reach any teen searching his way. There is sincerity in every page which I appreciated because most books about success are filled with fillers, truisms and half-truths. There is real experience here and a constant effort to lay down the rules. Buy the book and leave it in the living room: it will find its way to the teens living with you.
There are a few things that Gardner does not much talk about: part of what made him, and because it is part of him, he does not realize how important it was to his success. First is his constant curiosity: he is curious of other people, of what makes them tick, of what is going out in the world. I think that it is pretty hard to be successful if you go in life mentally blind to the world around you.
Second is his immense capacity to do dull work. There is nothing as discouraging as cold calls in business: you call people you do not know to sell them something, 99 percent of the time, they hang up on you, and that is when they do not insult you, so your capacity to be rejected has to be pretty good to go on doing it. Now Chris Gardner, when he started, decided to give 200 calls a day. Superman does that! Suppose you tell a class of teenagers that if they do it for a year, they will have a comfortable position in life, how many would still do it after three days?
Third is his capacity to admire: Gardner is able to learn from anybody: poor or rich people, nice people or not: if there is something useful to him, he will take the lesson with him and remember it.
These three characteristics define more than Chris Gardner, they define many successful people from different horizons like Mark H. McCormack (What They Don't Teach You At Harvard Business School) or Quincy Jones. Quincy authored the most beautiful biography, but it is not for kids.
Curious, hardworking, able to admire others and learn from them: that what makes not only successful people but heroes.
2) John Grisham :Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer Grisham has written a thriller for teenagers which is intelligent, taut, full of indirect advice and delightful. Of all the successful writers or legal thrillers than I read, Grisham is the only one who always wonders what is the right thing to do: this is something any teen should be interested about, and it is the subject of this book.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
The Narcissist Generation
I should have seen it coming. The first time I saw a mobile phone, about twenty five years ago, I was very impressed: mobile phones were not cellular back then, they came with a heavy suitcase and looked like the army field phones. A person with a phone like this must have an important job and be able to answer in an emergency. That is what I thought.
A middle aged man sitting next to me at the airport took a heavy phone out of his case, deployed a five feet antenna and said:
“I am at the airport. The plane is on time.”
I guess I had expected 007, I felt deflated.
Similarly, when my friend Mr. Dulac, who had a small TV and electronic shop in the French town of Angouleme, installed a car phone for the first time, it was for a man who wanted to call his wife to tell her to open the garage door when he came home.
Nowadays when I go to the grocery store, one person out of three is on their cell phone. I roll my cart next to them, and what do they say?
“I am at Wal-Mart”, or “I am at Kroger’s” or they say: “I think that I’ll buy an Iceberg salad.”
Then they go home and they twitter the same message.
What kills me is that I do not understand whom they are talking to. Does one third of the country talk to the ten percent unemployed people we have? It does not make statistical sense. Who has the time to listen to this incessant chatter and to read all these Twitter and Facebook messages? What do these people DO?
What kind of friends does this new generation have? All my friends work. They remodel houses, they teach, they are ex-military going back to school, they pave roads, they invest, they write books. Even if they do not have a job, they all work. Of course all of them, including my ex-students, are over forty years old.
I think that if I called any of them to say that I am at the grocery store and considering, God forbid, buying an Iceberg salad, they would have me committed.
A middle aged man sitting next to me at the airport took a heavy phone out of his case, deployed a five feet antenna and said:
“I am at the airport. The plane is on time.”
I guess I had expected 007, I felt deflated.
Similarly, when my friend Mr. Dulac, who had a small TV and electronic shop in the French town of Angouleme, installed a car phone for the first time, it was for a man who wanted to call his wife to tell her to open the garage door when he came home.
Nowadays when I go to the grocery store, one person out of three is on their cell phone. I roll my cart next to them, and what do they say?
“I am at Wal-Mart”, or “I am at Kroger’s” or they say: “I think that I’ll buy an Iceberg salad.”
Then they go home and they twitter the same message.
What kills me is that I do not understand whom they are talking to. Does one third of the country talk to the ten percent unemployed people we have? It does not make statistical sense. Who has the time to listen to this incessant chatter and to read all these Twitter and Facebook messages? What do these people DO?
What kind of friends does this new generation have? All my friends work. They remodel houses, they teach, they are ex-military going back to school, they pave roads, they invest, they write books. Even if they do not have a job, they all work. Of course all of them, including my ex-students, are over forty years old.
I think that if I called any of them to say that I am at the grocery store and considering, God forbid, buying an Iceberg salad, they would have me committed.
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