Month: September 2024

Unexpectedly I get a phone call, the person on the other end is crying. They can hardly get out their first few sentences, but after a minute or so they are able to start. The go through their current situation and in the end say, ‘I don’t know what to do.’  

This has happened a few times in my life, and I am glad. The conversation continued for a while, with just me trying to get details, as if I am to help, I need to know more. I want to make sure the person first is ok, but it is the understanding of the situation that is key. I asked a few questions and replied with some links to information. I needed to balance two things, first to calm the person down and second to try to find a way to help in this situation. 

Now the problem was not resolved in a single call, in fact it is going to lead need some more information gathering on my friend’s side but as the conversation was closing, I mentioned please keep my updated as you know things, as in tomorrow and the next day. The response was ‘I don’t want to bother you.’ I had to stop them right away. My response was how can you deny me of being there for you, in fact I added on top, how can you deny any of your friends from being there when you need them.  

I think of anything this shocked them. We had a few minutes discussion about friendship. I have been thinking about this for a while. Even at my age, I am still learning the ins and outs of how to be a friend. I am sure I have failed or made mistakes, but I am only human. One thing I do know, and I told my children there is no greater gift than the one of friendship. Long before I heard that line in the movie Polar Express, it was something I believed. 

Friendship is not just being there for the good times; it is being there when they need you most. That also means often being there when they do not ask for it. It is calling them unexpectedly, it is saying yes to something you would not do, just to spend some time together. It is being the side kick, wingman or just company. But, when there is a tragedy, like when my wife passed, it was wonderful to have people around. And even more so many years later, many are still around helping in ways they might not think about. 

Then there is the Ben Frankin Effect. This is when you like someone better after doing something for them. Now of course this could be considered a part of cognitive dissonance, where even if you do not like a person, and help them you end up liking them. Let us put it in context, that helping a person you are already friends with allows you to like them more. The notion of helping someone brings you closer to them. I did not think about it this way, but people I have mentored over the years have become friends, I wonder if I ended up liking them due to the fact I was helping them?

This call, like many things that happen in my life, made me reflect again. How do I make friends? How do you have hard conversations with them? If there is something that does bother you about the friendship, can you bring it up? If so, how? As you get older why is it so hard to make friends?  And it also made me think, why didn’t I call some of my friends when some of the worst things happened to me? Why did I not ask to have someone just to talk to? Why did I deny some of my friends the pleasure of helping others? If one of the greatest things you can do is help other people, denying a friend to help you is denying them that feeling. 

In previous posts I talked about saying yes to things and making moments, that wonderful stories can come from adventures.  I am now realizing that those adventures may be great, but also helping others, and letting others help you is another fantastic way to build bonds between friends.  So do not be afraid to ask for help, and be happy when someone asks you for it.

By Larry Gold – LrAu

This opinion is mine, and mine only, my current or former employers have nothing to do with it. I do not write for any financial gain; I do not take advertising and any product company listed was not done for payment. But if you do like what I write you can donate to the charity I support (with my wife who passed away in 2017) Morgan Stanley’s Children’s Hospital or donate to your favorite charity. The fundraising site had to be restarted and NYP Hospital made changes to their donation sites. I pay to host my site out of my own pocket, my intention is to keep it free.  You are welcome to comment, but note it is moderated and all spam will be removed.

This Blog is a labor of love and was originally going to be a book. With the advent of being able to publish yourself on the web I chose this path. I will write many of these and not worry too much about grammar or spelling (I will try to come back later and fix it) but focus on content. I apologize in advance for my ADD as often topics may flip. I hope one day to turn this into a book and or a podcast, but for now it will remain a blog.  AI is not used in this writing other than using the web to find information. Images without notes are created using an AI tool that allows me to reuse them. 

I am sitting at work and wanting to be able to demonstrate an idea that is rattling around in my head. The logic in my brain drives me to aggregate data and let the data tell the story. I create all different views of the data, and my idea does have empirical information behind it. I am working up slides and just putting tables of data there does not energize me like the idea in my head. I debate whether I should ask a GPT could it show what I want it to show but realize it will not understand what I am talking about. I now start to question myself, am I going about this the right way? 

There is a famous quote attributed to Stalin, one death is a tragedy, one million deaths are a statistic. Just throwing statistics on a PowerPoint does not have the impact I would like. The impact of say a great movie, the one when you leave the theatre you and you can recount great scenes. More recently, it is a meme that you share over and over and make people crack up. What makes a difference between jamming facts and the movie or the meme?  

Over the week there is a document released from Mr. Beast about how he runs his company, it is a fantastic read. He wrote about different statistics he looks at. I decided to look at my blog statistics. The posts that have the most views, the most engagement are ones that personal stories. Stories that make you say ‘I have done that’ or ‘I can relate’ have more of an impact than just regurgitating a thought. The last two posts are stories, first I explained that I had an ADHD breakdown and the most recent one learning a lesson from taking my dog for a poop got people to talk to me about them. If I just posted, people with ADHD need tools, or any failure is mostly a chain of events instead of a single point to blame.  

The question I now asked was why is a story more impactful and memorable than just statistics? Why are a few lines meme more interesting than deep details? I started thinking is this why the bible is a list of stories? Is this why Aesop fables were so popular? Is this the reason that when Apple advertising they show people doing something with their hardware instead of just listing the specifications?  

According to research, stories are remembered twenty-two times more than facts alone. I am not sure how you measure that, nor do I know if it is a proven fact, but the use of stories is embedded within humanity.  Greek and Roman Mythology were used to teach lessons, it would be faster to just state the lesson but not as memorable. We still read Mythology, and study it and one of the top five reasons is to learn life lessons through entertainment. By just instructing students on what you want them to learn it would be faster, but it may not stick.  

Bruce Lee before he passed away was working on a movie the Game of Death. Bruce wanted the movie to be a lesson about life, the inability to adapt would end in destruction. The ability to learn lessons allows you to ascend. Bruce, like others before and after chose to use story telling as a way of teaching a lesson. It was mostly lost as he died before the movie was completed, and what was release was more exploitation than his script.  The Image below is a drawing by him describing the ascent.  

So here I am writing this week’s post, and my desire to get better every day and to document my journey. It is the stories of my life that teach me, and mostly the failures where I need to learn a lesson, many times learn a lesson more than once. The stories are more memorable, lead to great laughs with friends and make us think. It is more reason to have experiences and have delightful stories to tell so you can pass on wisdom to others. And no, I never finished that presentation, I scrapped the idea until I could produce a relevant story. It has taught me that I need a story to get my point across, and I will work on that this week. 

This opinion is mine, and mine only, my current or former employers have nothing to do with it. I do not write for any financial gain; I do not take advertising and any product company listed was not done for payment. But if you do like what I write you can donate to the charity I support (with my wife who passed away in 2017) Morgan Stanley’s Children’s Hospital or donate to your favorite charity. The fundraising site had to be restarted and NYP Hospital made changes to their donation sites. I pay to host my site out of my own pocket, my intention is to keep it free.  You are welcome to comment, but note it is moderated and all spam will be removed. 

This Blog is a labor of love and was originally going to be a book. With the advent of being able to publish yourself on the web I chose this path. I will write many of these and not worry too much about grammar or spelling (I will try to come back later and fix it) but focus on content. I apologize in advance for my ADD as often topics may flip. I hope one day to turn this into a book and or a podcast, but for now it will remain a blog.  AI is not used in this writing other than using the web to find information. Images without notes are created using an AI tool that allows me to reuse them. 

It is always strange where lessons pop into my life. The other day I went to walk my dog, I grabbed the leash, my dog got over excited, I clicked it into her harness and off we went. Belle is getting a little older, so we do many short walks, and occasionally I take her on long hikes. This walk was around the block to get her outside and get me outside for a few minutes.  

A few minutes into the walk Belle had to go poop. I went to get a bag to pick it up, and there was none left. This is another first world problem, those of you who know me know I use this expression often. But my first reaction was anger, who used the last bag? Which one of my kids did not refill? Why didn’t I look to see if there were no empty bags before I left on the walk? Redirecting the anger from others to myself, also not a good thing. 

While walking back to the house I started thinking a bit more rationally. There is a classic saying that two wrongs do not make a right. This situation had a new definition of two wrongs. In this case, yes whoever used the last bag should have reloaded the leash. I also should have looked at it. I started thinking about other situations where there is a chain of failures, and we often look for a sole source of blame.  

Why do we want a sole source of blame? And why do we not want the sole source of blame not to be us? Our brains are as complex as they are like simple, they like shortcuts. When there is noise or unnecessary information our brains do their best to ignore it. If there is missing information in our brains, try to fill it in to make sense of what we are seeing and hearing. The classic story of why Lucille Ball could get Russian signals in her teeth, as the story goes was to dispel the myth of how powerful they could be. Having a single spot to blame is used by marketers to sell you things, as well as politicians to sell you on voting for them. Just as I wanted to blame one of my daughters than thinking there were two reasons for the failure, hearing someone I already dislike is the cause of my problems.  

I challenge myself to get past my first reaction and dig deeper. Solving problems is where I want my brain to be spending its energy. In the case of the situation, I thought of a few things: 

• Putting a second bag holder, yes, I could run into the same situation with two 
• Wrapping a bag around the handle, as a reminder if you use one on the handle to replace the bag, or if you pick it up without one on the handle you need to replace the bags. 
• I could put a note on the door, do not forget bags 
• Etc. 

In any situation understanding anger that comes from problems is a chance to redirect that anger to problem solving. I need to remind myself of that lesson and think about my dog. 

This opinion is mine, and mine only, my current or former employers have nothing to do with it. I do not write for any financial gain; I do not take advertising and any product company listed was not done for payment. But if you do like what I write you can donate to the charity I support (with my wife who passed away in 2017) Morgan Stanley’s Children’s Hospital or donate to your favorite charity. The fundraising site had to be restarted and NYP Hospital made changes to their donation sites. I pay to host my site out of my own pocket, my intention is to keep it free.  You are welcome to comment, but note it is moderated and all spam will be removed.

This Blog is a labor of love and was originally going to be a book. With the advent of being able to publish yourself on the web I chose this path. I will write many of these and not worry too much about grammar or spelling (I will try to come back later and fix it) but focus on content. I apologize in advance for my ADD as often topics may flip. I hope one day to turn this into a book and or a podcast, but for now it will remain a blog.  AI is not used in this writing other than using the web to find information. Images without notes are created using an AI tool that allows me to reuse them.