Full of Pain, there is Room only for Happiness

I have come to the end of my time here in the Dominican Republic, and I find I have much left still to consider. In one of our reflections sessions with our groups of volunteers, we are asked to define and discuss “Social Justice.” The result is a pantheon of values and opinions but never a concrete solution. Like “solving poverty” or deciding if “development is good”, there are no simple answers because the topics all rely on answering key parts of the human condition. It is a struggle as old as civilization. A struggle that many religions have tried to solve. That we have reached no solutions as humans speaks to how difficult they are to solve.

Here in this one small town in the mountains of the Dominican Republic, I have pondered many parts of these questions daily. I work with and around children who have very little in the way of material goods. I will return with vivid memories of handing small children single hot wheels and seeing their eyes light up and their imaginations take shape as they hustle off to play in the dusty, rocky road. A single jump rope galvanizes a group of preteen girls into action, leading to song and play, with a fervent declaration of “more” from kids less accustomed to having friends and thus not included in the group’s fun. A tube of bubbles elicits the same giggles here as anywhere. There is also much suffering. I have watched many a child without any friendship skills or power struggle as another, larger or older child takes away a ball or game. Here the Platonic explanation of how might does not make right is fully unsupported. If you have the larger share of size or friends, you get what you want. I cannot explain the regular iron taste I get in my mouth, and the tightening in the pit of my stomach as injustice unfolds and a child’s happiness is dashed. There are so many kids here without present parents that there often isn’t even anyone to comfort or succor those in need.

It is as if time and life have passed this village by. Girls getting pregnant at 14, several volunteers remarked a few weeks ago, is medieval. Yet it is the way here. When my English classes faltered and attendance shrank from dozens to a trickle, I was not surprised. I’d already noticed that I had but a small window of grace to teach in. My only viable students were the boys and girls who had yet to reach puberty and who were not athletic enough to play sports all afternoon. The one or two older ones who had already learned some English all had other responsibilities, one ran her family’s small store, another was constantly off to help his father and uncle with farming and husbandry. When I had so many students attending, I knew it wouldn’t last. They came in a crowd, as though a whole clan had left behind the Bachata and sitting in the shade to come see this Americano in action and see what was up. There were women ranging from 13-25 there, and a gaggle of four or five small children who belonged to those ladies. I never got more than a few minutes of attention from my students, as that is all they have to give in a culture where no one has ever expected them to concentrate on learning.

I felt this same lack of discipline whenever I helped the volleyball or baseball teams practice. The kids spend so much of their lives just surviving, there is no room for strength in other less important areas. It’s wonderful and thrilling to have them playing sports together. Truly when the alternative for these girls is sitting around and waiting to get pregnant, I know that whatever this volleyball team gives them is a blessing. As the boys run laps and stretch together more and more before their baseball scrimmage, I am constantly hopeful for how their team will develop over the months and years. However, it is hard to feel the progress and credit it as meaningful in its impact when it falls so short of the potential of people their age. I feel so commonly here a stifling density, a weight of poverty burdening the people that is so heavy that they dare not lift their head or give over their concentration to any other form of diversion lest the load crush them.

The few children who seem to have a possible path out, I wish the best, even though I can feel the draining of resources from an already meager existence. If the smartest children with a little more means to scrape by manage to escape from this town, then what hope do the people left over have. When the hope of change is gone, there is nothing left to do but join together into a tighter family. If everyone has nothing, at least they can have each other. This is the happiness of the Dominican Republic. I have been told here by several people with pride that it is the happiest nation on earth, and that when international surveys are taken, people here have more joy and a better sense of togetherness than other places. Under that pride is a sick, savage reality. Many children here are raised by their grandparents or not at all because one or more parents have died and the other is off making money in the capital and sending it home. So many of these children are completely illiterate and don’t know their own alphabet at 12, 13, or 14, and cannot think in more than one step. I have been overjoyed to lose to a few of them in Checkers or Connect 4, because those that can fathom the strategy and win have learned how to think. There are many kids here who are nine, ten, or eleven and already their chance has passed. Their peers all just say “he doesn’t know” when you try to talk to the child. When I’ve gotten a moment with these kids, they seem simply shy, and downtrodden. Likely suffering in silence because they have some difference or perhaps fall on some spectrum that goes unidentified here. Once fallen behind, they have fallen victim to the Pirates Code and are left behind. They tag along at the edges for now. I can only assume they eventually join the ranks of drunks and crazies that often stumble through town only to have insults thrown their way by the hordes of unattended children, with no recourse but to throw rocks as the peals of laughter and screams of fear echo for blocks.

I reflect here daily on some of the absurdities of American culture and individualism. People here are reasonable to be shocked by parts of American culture that require independence, as it is wholly foreign to them. I have come to a sort of balancing description of our differing cultures that I think sums things up fairly well: In the United States we are more independent and take more individual responsibility for things, but have less group responsibility for the people around us. In the Dominican Republic they have little individual responsibility but take care of groups like family and neighbors. On the flip side, our personal independence and ability contribute to an overall society that is more responsible and productive than the Dominicans. Here much of progress is stifled by what we would call corruption, but to them is far less insidious since it is simply people making short term decisions that help each other look out for their own smaller circles.

I do not mean to imply that our individualism and personal responsibility mantra is without fault - for there are many Americans left behind by our creed, and many more subjected to daily micro-aggressions as a result of ignored privilege from those perpetrating the micro-aggressions (or blatant bias or racism, but I have the privilege of always trying to give the benefit of the doubt). Many a Bernie supporter would tell you that our system needs to be dismantled. Most of those people also come from a position of privilege and would be well served by coming here to learn more about their own privilege and the true power and value of our supposedly malignant institutions. There is certainly room for improvement to our system. You need look no further than the Black Lives Matter movement to see the need for accountability and an end to racial violence amongst our honorable men and women in uniform. Likewise, for an apt comparison to the problems faced here in Derrumbadero, you need only look at the suffering of many lower and middle class Americans through the Rust Belt who voted for Donald Trump because they see in him a strongman who will try anything and speak up for their forgotten and missed lives and livelihoods. People here in Derrumbadero voted in their own corrupt mayor for another term last year because he distributed bags of rice and beans on election day. To put it in a way that seems to get through to many of our American volunteers here, planning for the future is a privilege, and people don’t have that privilege here. If you spoke, patiently and with deference, to Trump supporters who voted for him as a means of grabbing the bull by it’s balls, they might be able to figure out some of the longer term damage he is capable of, or connect the dots between his reductivism and reactionary Twitter use with the reasonable fear of putting him in charge of a nuclear arsenal. You also might find that many of those people couldn’t get to that logic. They’d stop somewhere along the line of “but he’s going to change things and that means I might have a chance again”.

Culture and change are messy affairs. Here in the Dominican Republic I have had several conversations with people who voice legitimate gripes about the current president (for example he said during his Independence Day speech in February that there are not poor people in the Dominican Republic). These same people also have voiced a desire to keep him in power, or at the very least gratitude that he is the president. In this country, there have been many terrible presidents, some dictators, and occupations by various countries (including the United States). Danillo, the current president, may enjoy a good photo op more than he enjoys the hard work of solving problems, and he may be disastrously out of touch with some of the problems in the southern part of the country, but what he lacks in strengths, he also lacks in vices. With luck and time, the next president may be better, and help lead this country forward. There are, after all, many trees being planted here to help forestall the erosion and damage like they have experienced in Haiti, and many roads have been built. Unlike the slogans ironically shackling every town’s entrance, poverty has not been eradicated in our generation. I have little hope of that here. But with a youth center, a new road, potentially running water again by year’s end, and the dedication of a few forward thinking families, this town can grow and prosper.

Ultimately I have gained here in Derrumbadero some lessons I hope to grow on for the rest of my life. I have another family. Flor, my host mother, is always taking in more. From what I can count, she has three adopted children who she simply started feeding and housing because she could. No matter what anyone has, they can always give. It reminds me of the Bible passage (Mark 12) where Jesus praises a woman who gives her only coin to the temple while chastising the rich men who gave only a small portion of their vast wealth. It is not what you have but what you give. I have learned how deep my education goes. I continue to learn how much I owe to my parents and their diligence in raising me to be a thinking, reading young man. If the children here were as lucky as I am in the parents I have, I am certain that the world would be at their fingertips. Every time I read a book to the smallest children here, I felt the weight of my parents’ and siblings commitment to reading that helped me learn so strongly to love books. I have learned here an expression for pain and happiness that I wish I’d known sooner, for it so aptly describes life’s waxing and waning emotions. It comes from the graphic novel Persepolis, and since I have not read it in years, sadly I am paraphrasing: A person only has so much room for pain. When they are filled, there is nothing left but to be happy.

Grandparents and a City on a Hill

I have been thinking a lot about my grandfather during my stay in the Dominican Republic. As a child, I remember my mother presenting several sides to her father. While much of it was good and spoke of how deeply our bonds of family connected us, some of what I remember came in the form of warnings. She would talk about how she had fled the restrictive Baptist culture into which she was born. Chafing from a young age against the precepts of predestination and the paternalistic approach to how you needed to be saved to be worthy of Christ’s warm embrace, she paid lip service to her parents’ faith only until she left home for college. The most educated person in her family, I remember hearing her talk about teaching her father how to read, and can still sense today how some of her drive for excellence was a desire to have more and be a more complete person than she saw in her father. I remember warnings in the car on the way to visits that if he said something narrow, overtly racist, or ignorant, I should try to respond with grace, and seek to enjoy the visit. I never remember feeling those same emotions of recoil that I felt coming from her. She also loved and took care of her father, giving him a place to stay and visiting him relentlessly in his final years. When we went to his funeral, I was afraid that I would feel little grief for a man I hardly knew, as much of what I did know seemed tainted by backwards beliefs and an antiquated world view. But at his funeral I also remember being struck by the true passion with which his pastor talked of his constant attendance at church. His dedication and years spent cleaning and maintaining the physical facility, and most of all, I was touched by the poems that my mother and his pastor read that they had found in his diaries. Simple in verse, they spoke of a love for his grandchildren, nature, and his church.

It came to me slowly that perhaps it had been unlucky that I hadn’t gotten much chance to get to know him. Among the few things I inherited from him were several thick flannel coats and his army handbook from basic training during the Second World War. I treasure those possessions. I also have always felt a deep willingness to forgive him for his faults. I do not know, but I feel it likely that many of his limitations were a reflection of the limitations he grew up with during the Great Depression. I can’t blame him for many of his misconceptions about the world and his readiness to blame others for the problems he had. I see many the same faults and limitations present in the rhetoric of the far right political movements in the United States today.

That brings me to why I keep thinking about my grandfather while I’ve been here in the Dominican Republic. The 108 year-old abuelo who lives with my host family is one strong reason. It is vitalizing to live alongside a man who has lived for so long and seen so much change in the world. More than that though, I think about my grandfather as I reflect on some of the limitations in the village here. The education system is crass and ineffectual. The poverty is deep and pervasive, every day people make decisions that will only perpetuate their poverty. But like how I didn’t blame my grandfather for his issues, I can’t help but think that this community is not at fault for their faults. I have learned here a lot about community and family, and how they use a wealth of social support and propensity for laughter to face daily hardship.

One thing that Barack Obama got so completely right about his meteoric rise to power and fame was also deeply involved in many of the reasons for the dominoes of Democratic politicians falling out of office after. He ran on a platform of Hope and Change. These two concepts are the lifeblood of communities all across the world. Here in Derrumbadero, they will once again have running water by year’s end, and the main street was paved last year for the first time. Each step forward is accompanied by a similar step backwards or sideways, but through it all the people rely on each other, their faith in God, and an underlying hope for the future. It is only when we let our conviction for change rest on unattainable goals instead of gritty realities that we lose the ability to connect our present circumstances with our potential for growth. Politicians in the United States have many powerful voices competing for their time and attention, and filling their coffers with dollars that dictate policy. In order to rise again as a party, Democrats need to counter Donald’s vision of Fear and Change by revitalizing their own of Hope and Change, and then work relentlessly at making small changes that show that hope. It is only when we look to the future as a place for us all to gain through concord and community that we can be the City on a Hill that makes up the core of the American Dream.

An American Dreaming of a Better Future

History has a way of being conveniently forgotten by most people. We tend to live our lives in pursuit of daily, hourly, or even up-to-the-minute gratification. This makes sense, as it’s hard to set a longer term goal and then reverse engineer things to see how one could ultimately reach that goal with hard work and sacrifice in the shorter term. It’s even harder for a community, ideology, or government to do this. Examples of this type of amnesia abound and are easy to find, but hard to remember again afterwards. As a nation, the United States has learned over and over again that people who come here for a better future will bring with them fresh ideas, a strong will, and definitive contributions. I’ve watched the movie “Gangs of New York” four or five times just to remind myself of this fact: When the Irish came to the US in droves around the turn of the 20th century, they were treated as less than, as trash, and as the scum of the earth because of their origin, poverty, and their religion.

My family learned a few years ago a little more about where my father’s “clan” came from. They were a border clan in Scotland that wasn’t really wanted there, moved to Ireland, weren’t wanted there, and ultimately came to the United States around a hundred years ago for a fresh start. Just last year my mother got her genealogy done, and since she was adopted at birth, the information was a revelation. Turns out she is half European Jew, and thus I am a quarter. I don’t know when her birth parents came to the United States, it could have been a long time ago, but given that she is a baby boomer, it seems likely at least one of her parents came here during or after World War II in search of safety and religious freedom.

I am unequivocally American. I know this to my bones. I know this from how I talk, aggressively asserting my opinion and aggressively asking others to share theirs. I know this from how I think, my belief in capitalism, and my willingness to argue with but ultimately accept the differences with another American who doesn’t believe in capitalism at all. And most of all I know this because of my ability to dream; my understanding that while Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine have in them the sins of ethnocentrism and genocide, they also include a grandiose vision for a nation unbounded where potential is only matched by performance. We are a country whose driving creed is an idea, not a religion or ethnicity.

People who want to come to the United States often share these same urges, dreams, and beliefs. Many people whose families have been here for generations upon generations have had their dreams trampled and feel crushed under the weight of immobility. This feeling is genuine, heartfelt, and tragic. People who voted for Donald Trump because they saw a possibility for change were exercising what they have left of an American Spirit. They were sadly misguided, in that their spirit led them to support a man who pridefully abuses women and exists as a mirror for the darker side of our society, the instant-gratification section of our collective psyche that wants things to be solved by aphorism instead of nuance. I think of Donald as not unlike the leader of the Natives in Gangs of New York. His passion and desire for power far outstrip his ability to reason, and his followers, in his own words, would follow him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue.

As a country we have the substance and character to overcome his challenge. We have the ability to reach for something better. To reach for a dream of a society that has nuance, that values our diversity and recognizes that when we ask each other for compassion, we receive it. Throughout my time here in the Dominican Republic, in a poor rural village, I have been quietly prideful of all of the great opportunities we have in the United States. Here the vicious cycle of poverty extends from the capital to the boonies. The people who have ferocity, ambition, and drive succeed. But even in their success they have so much less material opportunity than many people in the States who we consider unlucky. As has happened consistently whenever I have gotten the chance to travel, I am confronted by some of the unfair and evil choices the US has made in international policy and international trade. But more than that, I am confronted by our immense success and ability to create. As a nation we have a work ethic and drive that is genetic and trained. When we accept the strivers from all around the world, our diverse nation is stronger for it. I am reminded nearly every day here of how much power and meaning there is in our slogan: E Pluribus, Unum.

Poor is Poor the World Across

For about a month now I have been living and working in the Dominican Republic. Derrumbadero is a poor, rural village of around 3000 in the mountains in the South-West of the DR only a few short clicks away from the border with Haiti. With no running water and electricity only most days, and seldom on the weekends, it is a community that is poor in material wealth and opportunity, yet it persists.

One of the first things that I said to my new bosses was to authoritatively state that “Poor is poor the world across.” While aphoristic and null in literal content, it contains several veiled beliefs about humans that I have spent a lot of time here trying to unpack.

As an agricultural community where the houses lack any real privacy or ability to be secured, the men mostly spend their days in a series of Sisyphun tasks tending the fields and livestock while the women hover near the cookfire and the constantly stewing rice and beans without ever leaving the house empty lest some of their few existing possessions get up and walk away. The dance between constant friendly socializing and fearful protectionism is reminiscent of a stereotypical high-stakes socialite dinner party.

I meditate daily on the ladder that I have had access to in my life in contrast to the one they have here. For a few days early on in my trip I was torn by a problem I still see as unresolved: If I spend time helping and working here with some of the best and brightest, those who have the most potential and ambition to leave this village and head to Santo Domingo, the capital, in pursuit of work and opportunity and dreams, am I in fact contributing to the drain of resources from a place whose resources are already meager?

This brings me back to a few of the assertions inherent in the statement that “Poor is Poor the world across”. No matter the absolute value, anytime one set of people has less or more than another, it creates a gap which people seek to bridge. I have heard it said here (and is a quote from the amazing graphic novel Persepolis) that people only have so much room for pain before the only response left is to be happy. Here there is much to cause pain and much about which it is reasonable to be upset. The same is true for both poor and rich people all across the world. Part of our human condition is a state of constant comparison, judgement, and ultimately a journey towards self-fulfillment.

My host father here, Gonzalez, is a 65 year old man who takes joy in small jokes, and quietly exudes confidence, authority, and decency. He likely has had many reasons to be unhappy in his life, and certainly from my context has cause to be angry daily about the situation life has given him.
Instead, Gonzalez, along with many of the people here has responded to his life by finding joy. He greets each new day with the cheerfulness of a man who is feeding his chickens mere moments after the sun has risen. He straps on his machete, dons his rubber boots, and begins his daily care in the onion fields with a dulcet whistle. Each day ends with time spent around the warmth of a small urn arguing with friends about the relative merits of chemicals in agriculture, the weather, and of course, how I didn’t eat enough rice and beans at lunch.

Run to the Middle. Every. Time.

Winning in wrestling is about discipline. I learned that lesson over and over again through my time as a high school wrestler and as a coach. For my junior and senior years, our coaching staff was graced by the panther-like presence of a man we called Coach Shoops. We usually had three coaches, our head coach was the middle weight, and then the assistant coaches would be split one for the little guys and one for the big boys. Shoops was big and quick. He weighed around 200lbs and was constantly carrying around a med school textbook as he studied for whatever exam was next.

Shoops had a variety of little techniques he added to my repertoire. Because he was technically sound where I was quirky, and much quicker than I, I don't remember picking up too many larger moves from him. What I did learn was a style of thinking and gamesmanship that helped me win matches.

Like I said, winning in wrestling is about discipline. The head coach, Quilty, made sure we worked hard enough to have physical discipline, and were sufficiently drilled in techniques to have technical discipline. Shoops made sure we were ready to get inside our opponents' heads and grind them into the mat. He made sure we had competitive discipline.

Some of his ideas were a little quixotic, but worked with practice. It took me a while, but eventually I managed to get good at pointing towards an opponent's shoe to make them think it had come untied, so I could strike while their attention was away from defense. One of my favorites of his was The Handshake Maneuver. If you act scared while warming up and then give a dead fish handshake, your opponent will underestimate your confidence and technique. If you are reading a book at the side of the mat and give him the double-handed nerdshake, chances are he will underestimate your strength. If you make exceptional eye contact while shaking hands, he might still be looking when the ref blows the whistle and you can strike first. The Handshake Maneuver was straight up fun for me.

The most effective and hardest of his recommendations was that whenever the whistle blew, no matter the score, run back to the middle of the mat. Some matches this wouldn't have much affect because it would only be at the end of the first and second periods. Other matches you'd be going out of bounds every ten seconds and having to restart over and over.

In those cases, you could win a match simply by running back to the middle. The first time you do it, your opponent might just think it's weird as he staggers/crawls back the 10ft to line up. The second, he might be a little irked by your unnecessary expenditure of energy. By the fifth or sixth, all he's thinking about is what it's going to take to make you break. If your whole team is doing this, you can track the morale of the other team as it sinks further and further. I know from personal experience that it's not easy to run back to the middle. It's even harder if you're losing. But if you can be disciplined enough to do it, you will win the mental battle and eventually, the physical one as well.

I mention all of this because I think if you cultivate discipline in any area, it will give you almost superhuman abilities. This doesn't take skill or money. All it takes is dedication and a desire to perform (and perhaps peers and mentors to help you get back up again when you mess up). If you want your employees to aspire to excellence, you have to teach them the basics and the techniques like Quilty did. You also have to give them the hard-knuckled fight and gamesmanship that Shoops taught.

Millennials Giving Back

As a generation we have a pretty bad rep. Whether it's our parents, employers, or the news, we seem to have been labeled, judged, and receive regular shaming. While I acknowledge much of this judgement is accurate, I think it is much more a reflection on those who came before us than it is a reflection on us. It is our duty to use our circumspection and faults to give back more than we've received.

I didn't choose to get participation trophies at the YMCA as a kid; expecting a seven year-old to refuse a trophy at the end of a season is ridiculous. Those trophies came about as a result of parents demanding that their child was special and so deserved a trophy no matter what. As a child, I, like many people I've talked to, knew that those trophies weren't worth anything. I had two shelves for my trophies, one for the YMCA ones that didn't matter (and even those I had arraigned to put the one or two trophies from "good" teams at the front), and one for the trophies from other sports leagues. This second shelf was much smaller, and its contents far more precious.

Our parents and our parents' generations have let us down in many ways. Complaining about it won't get us anywhere. Pointing it out is a decent step towards realizing what actually is the problem, but is likely to lead to much more awkward visits home that include far less congeniality.

The solution is something that many millennials have already taken to doing - making sure that what we do for a living reflects the values we hold as a generation. While this can mean a hippie approach to living which is unfeasible (or undesirable) for many people, it can also be done in almost any workplace through conscientious adherence to a set of values.

It's a done deal for us millennials that people can be whatever gender they feel fits them most. It's a no-brainer that people should be able to love whomever they love, people are people and love is what saved Harry Potter after all. Millennials are so cynical about institutions and the establishment that it sometimes hurts us, but often it just gives us a highly refined bullshit meter that lets us ignore the partisan hackery coming equally from Fox/Brietbart/Drudge as it does from MSNBC/HuffPo.

Millennials may be ignorant about many facets of world history, husbandry, home ec, or the energy industry. We do, however, know that war kills people and shouldn't be a political tool used by political tools. We do know that large companies who pollute are failing to incorporate the externalities of their products, and that is wrong. We haven't realized yet the tremendous cost of our haphazard destruction of the environment and workers rights because of companies like H&M and Forever 21 - we have yet to learn how to buy and repair quality goods. We can identify the damage and insidiousness of monopoly powers throughout American industries, even if we refuse to label companies like Amazon as such. Our disdain for wealthy liars and the lying politics they employ is massive.

We have not yet come into our own and demanded that the diversity and equality embedded in our values become a permanent part of the American experience. We will soon. Millennials are getting older and our startups are getting bigger. We are getting promotions and starting families, and we won't make the same mistakes our parents did - we will make our own, new, and idiotic mistakes! We won't settle for a status quo that gives so much to so few while leaving so many without a chance to succeed.

The one silver lining about the incoming Donald J. Trump administration came from my father. He said "It would be a shame if whoever comes after him just goes back to doing everything the same way we used to." I agree. I am terrified of the things he will do and the damage that he will cause as our "precedent". But I hold out hope that as we millennials grow up further and take the reins of power from our elders, we will forge a more inclusive, rigorously honest, and caring country. One that looks after its citizens instead of locking them up. One that refuses to let insurance companies determine healthcare policy and demands that all children have a chance to learn a profession and if needed, go to college.

I do not know what I want to "do" with my life. The idyllic notion of joining a company and staying with it for life and pension isn't gone, but it does require sacrifices that many millennials are unwilling to make. If we want to live in a country that embodies our values, we need to be disciplined and over time demand that our governments, institutions, and workplaces reflect those values. The best way for us to give back and deserve the privilege we inherited as 21st century Americans is to demand through our jobs and social lives that our society leap forward to meet our challenges and take advantage of the technological paradise in which we live.

A Story of Growth

Sometimes it takes a life-changing event to realize something that was always in front of us.

Yesterday I listened to a man in his 40's tell a story to an elderly lady while eating lunch at a diner. In his mid 20's he had gone on a skiing trip with his then girlfriend and a few other friends. After a day of frustration helping out his timid girlfriend, he decided to go on one last run with a friend who was very talented at skiing.

After taking the lift to the top of the mountain (for the first time all day) and banking into a few sharp turns and steep downhills while following his friend, he decided to try to do one of the trick jumps his friend was doing. He mistimed and misaligned the jump and instead of landing the perfect back-flip he saw in his minds-eye, he went flying head-over-heels and ended up sliding off a 40ft drop.

Ribs cracked, lungs punctured, hips and pelvis broken, he recounted going in and out of consciousness as they tried to stuff a breathing tube down his throat on the helicopter. Without the ability to speak, he finally coughed sideways and saw the teeth that had been lodged in his throat fly out the helicopter window.

He woke up again once before his induced coma - long enough to recognize a doctor in the ER as the shortstop, Pedro, from his middle-school baseball team. Pedro didn't recognize him because of the gore, but saved his life with numerous surgeries.

After talking in detail about his reckless decision and the debilitating aftermath, the man concluded with a simple observation - "I had been so reckless with my life up to that point because I thought no one was watching and no one cared. It was only when I woke up after weeks in a coma to see my friends and family gathered around that I realized people had been there the whole time."

By our very nature, we to slip into solipsism. We feel isolated and scared to face our inner wildman. But the truth is, people are watching, they do care, and what we do every day can help and effect those around us for the better.

(Get Dirty to) Validate Your Staff's Roles

Lots of managers badmouth the jobs their staff do. You can draw a direct line from how much the boss validates the staff jobs to how motivated the staff are to do their jobs.

If a manager believes any job is 'beneath' him or her, then the staff won't want to do that job. If a manager believes that the hardest, dirtiest, most complicated task should be their own, then staff will aspire to do the hardest, dirtiest, most complicated task they can. If a manager attempts to use their authority to rest, do less, or have privilege, then the staff will seek to rest, do less, and have privilege. 

At camp this is really easy to see and to avoid by action. One tactic I use all the time that works wonders (and is fun to boot!) is to play with kids. If you make it a habit to play with the kids as often as possible as an administrator at camp, then not only does that validate the counselors' role of playing with kids, it helps them visualize what it means to get really good at their jobs - most administrators became administrators because they were really good at the "lower" job. In some jobs and roles it's not practical to go do the work of your entry level staff, which means you have to be much more cognizant of the words you use to describe their role and job, as actions speak much louder than words.

A second valuable tactic for this at camp (and I recognize not everyone would choose this one, but you could pick your own gross/stressful job that you happen to enjoy) is that most days I would jump down in the kitchen and help out a counselor who had the chore of doing the whole camp's dishes. I love the machine efficiency of using an industrial dishwasher, and knew that the dreaded dishes was often something that a new counselor had a lot of apprehension about. If I stepped in and helped out, something they thought would be a drag on their day and take up part of the coveted Rest Hour would instead be done in 20 minutes with little fuss. Knowing your boss has your back, gets your apprehensions, and is willing to get dirty to make sure you have a good day builds loyalty.

Personal Kryptonite and First Impressions

One of the most successful millennials I know explained to a group of us that her professional kryptonite is incompetence. She further defined that to include people who don't try, saying that when someone is trying hard, she can work with them to improve. Getting people to try is the hardest and most important aspect of management.

While she was being a big sarcastic and bombastic, it got me thinking a little bit more about how our personal preferences influence the way we get our staff to be intrinsically motivated to perform at their best. First impressions are key, both for the employer and the employee, and it is important that we stay true to ourselves in how we present in those key moments, otherwise we will create unsustainable personas that people will soon see through.

If you, like my friend, truly value competence, make sure that is communicated through your attire, body language, and opening words with new employees. You can do this for any value you have. You should also make use of your physical surroundings.


Assuming you have succeeded in engendering your intended values with an intentional first impression, you still have to actively create an environment that continues that value and regularly use implicit and explicit methods of keeping that value around.

One of the most important values to me is working hard and working efficiently. One way I like to show to my staff at camp that I value those two things is that I will try to identify whatever task in a given situation or project will be the hardest or most complicated or involved and publicly work on that task whilst teaching staff (and campers since I know the campers will one day be staff so it's never too early to get them competent). Since a large portion of jobs at camp are dirty or gross, this often means doing my best Mike Rowe imitation and getting dirty.

You don't always have to get dirty, and you don't always have to do the hardest task publicly, but showing your staff that what they are doing matters and is not beneath anyone is a powerful method of motivating them, since it validates their effort and allows them to picture themselves transitioning from their entry level job into a manager or executive. The new CEO of JC Penny, Marvin Ellison, is a paragon of this executive virtue, and it's paying off.

How do you reward/appreciate planning?

Today the PD did a really great job planning things out. It was her day off starting at 9:30am this morning, so she had to appoint someone to be PD. The counselor she picked was a fantastic choice; full of ideas and energy, a third year counselor, and was very honored to get to be PD.

The PD also wrote her schedule to be mainly rain-adaptable since it was supposed to thunderstorm all day, though we somehow just managed to be be "dry" but sticky all day instead. Her schedule featured things like dining hall bowling, makeovers, board and card games, puppet-making, and a slew of other activities that were tailor-made for indoor weather.

I'm just not sure how to properly appreciate her for a job well thought out. Maybe I'll give my Reinforcement Award at staff meeting to the counselor, and mention her being PD on that (which she did a great job at, so duh), and then make sure to tell the PD how much I thought her planning led to the counselor having a good day and that she was an excellent choice. That way I get to thank/appreciate them both in different ways with the same Award - and since it's another of my administrator's award system I've adapted, all of the awards also stand as a testament to his good idea.