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2022-04-06

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The confusing pursuit of beauty

If you're a man, at some point a woman will ask you how she looks.
You must be careful how you answer this question. The best technique is to form an honest yet sensitive response, then promptly excuse yourself for some kind of emergency. Trust me, this is the easiest way out. No amount of rehearsal will help you come up with the right answer.
The problem is that men do not think of their looks in the same way women do. Most men form an opinion of themselves in seventh grade and stick to it for the rest of their lives. Some men think they're irresistibly desirable, and they refuse to change this opinion even when they grow bald and their faces visibly wrinkle as they age.
Most men, I believe, are not arrogant about their looks. If the transient thought passes through their minds at all, they like to think of themselves as average-looking. Being average doesn't bother them; average is fine. They don't affix much value to their looks, or think of them in terms of aesthetics. Their primary form of beauty care is to shave themselves, which is essentially the same care they give to their lawns. If, at the end of his four-minute allotment of time for grooming, a man has managed to wipe most of the shaving cream out of the strands of his hair and isn't bleeding too badly, he feels he's done all he can.
Women do not look at themselves this way. If I had to guess what most women think about their appearance, it would be: "Not good enough." No matter how attractive a woman may be, her perception of herself is eclipsed by the beauty industry. She has trouble thinking I'm beautiful, She magnifies the smallest imperfections in her body and imagines them as glaring flaws the whole world will notice and ridicule.
Why do women consider their looks so deficient? This chronic insecurity isn't inborn, but created through the interaction of many complex psychological and societal factors, beginning with the dolls we give them as children. Girls grow up playing with dolls proportioned so that, if they were human, they would be seven feet tall and weigh 61 pounds, with tiny thighs and a large upper body. This is an absurd standard to live up to, especially when you consider the size of the doll's waist, a relative measurement physically impossible for a living human to achieve. Contrast this absurd standard with that presented to little boys with their "action figures". Most of the toys that young boys have played with were weird-looking, like the one called Buzz-Off that was part human, part flying insect. This guy was not a looker, but he was still extremely self-confident. You could not imagine him saying to the others, "Is this accessory the right shade of violet for this outfit?"
But women grow up thinking they need to look like Barbie dolls or girls on magazine covers, which for most women is impossible. Nonetheless, the multibillion-dollar beauty industry, complete with its own aisle in the grocery store, is devoted to constant warfare on female self-esteem, convincing women that they must buy all the newest moisturizing creams, bronzing powders and appliances that promise to "stimulate and restore" their skin. I once saw an Oprah Show in which supermodel Cindy Crawford dispensed makeup tips to the studio audience. Cindy had all these middle-aged women apply clay masks and other "wrinkle-removing" products to their faces; she stressed how important it was to adhere to the guidelines, like applying products via the tips of their fingers to protect elasticity. All the women dutifully did this, even though it was obvious to any rational observer that, no matter how carefully they applied these products, they would never have Cindy Crawford's face or complexion.
I'm not saying that men are superior. I'm just saying that you're not going to get a group of middle-aged men to plaster cosmetics to themselves under the instruction of Brad Pitt in hopes of looking more like him. Men don't face the same societal focus purely on physical beauty, and they're encouraged to reach out to other characteristics to promote their self-esteem. They might say to Brad: "Oh yeah? Well, what do you know about lawn care, pretty boy?"
Of course women argue that they become obsessed with appearance as a reaction to pressure from men. The truth is that most men think beauty is more than just lipstick and perfume and take no notice of these extra details. I have never once, in more than 40 years of listening to men talk about women, heard a man say, "She had gorgeous fingernails!" To most men, little things like fingernails are all homogeneous anyway, and one woman's flawless pink polish is exactly as invisible as another's bare nails.
By participating in this system of extreme conformity, women are actually opening themselves up to the scrutiny of other women, the only ones qualified to judge their efforts. What is the real benefit of working this hard to appease men who don't notice when it only exposes women to prosecution from other women?
Anyway, to get back to my original point: If you're a man, and a woman asks you how she looks, you can't say she looks bad without receiving immediate and well-deserved outrage. But you also can't shower her with empty compliments about how her shoes complement her dress nicely because she'll know you're lying. She has spent countless hours worrying about the differences between her looks and Cindy Crawford's. Also,she suspects that you're not qualified to voice a subjective opinion on anybody's appearance. This may be because you have shaving cream in your hair and inside the folds of your ears.

Making the choice to be truly beautiful

1．Extreme makeovers are all the rage these days, with too many people addicted to Botox injection parties and reality shows. Plastic surgery is on the rise. Many people are trying to match the extraordinary measures actors and actresses go through to look perfect on the screen. Yet, the shortcuts to create biomedical happiness by having surgery, taking supplements or dieting don't usually fulfill their promise. Besides, beautiful people are not automatically happy people.

2．Attaining the highest degree of your beauty is not about looking good during social interaction, or physiological perfection, and you can't get there via technology. It's a growth process, a transformation of self through awareness and learning. It's about meaning, and being real. It's an emotional and spiritual walk, and it requires faith fueled with liberal doses of loving kindness.

3．Every day, I have the delight and privilege of loving Richard, my husband, a real, human, emotionally accessible man. We're about the same age, and our looks have corroded a bit over time. After almost 20 years, though, we have grown together in ways that go far deeper than the surface of our skin. Our life is lovely even if it doesn't match the criterion of love in movie fantasies. We laugh together, we share the struggles of daily life together, and the thought that he might die before I do fills me with dread. All the muscle-bound male models in the world couldn't replace my very own, sensual, outgoing friend. It took me 37 years to find him, and I'm not about to replace him with the so-called "esthetic perfection".

4．I work as a psychotherapist, and clients come to my office every day scarred with emotional pain because their lives aren't "perfect" enough. They feel inadequate, hopeless, and frustrated with jealousy because they can't attain life as they see it on the big screen. It helps when I preface our sessions with the mention that tens of thousands of dollars go into every second of media they see, that stars have dozens of people devoted exclusively to making them look good (even when they're naked), that the effort of maintaining their images is an exhausting, full-time job. The "beautiful" people in the media are under enormous pressure to maintain their looks, and for some reason, my clients don't realize that they're exempt from that predominant pressure.

5．I underscore that all the face creams, physical workouts, dietary fads, Prozac capsules and meditation regiments in the world aren't going to make their lives, their bodies, or their mental state much better. In fact, they often hamper happiness by distracting from the things that lead to real inner beauty. Life is not about maintaining some young and stylish outward costume to hide behind. It's about growing and deepening your soul.

6．The only way I know to develop my soul is through feelings. Witnessing natural phenomena - the star-lit galaxy, a centuries-old redwood, the symphony of birds' songs in spring - stretches it, making me feel humble and majestic, all at the same time. Human relationships bruise, collide and comfort, teaching me maturity and passion. Love urges my soul to blossom and glow, affection elicits feelings of eternity, and so I learn to accept others as they are.

7．The humans in my life are not the barren, self-absorbed "beautiful people" of the screen. We're ordinary, real, imperfect people. Together, we work hard stumbling through life, trying to be our best selves, knitting together families and friendships, and striving to illuminate the world with our personal ethics and aspirations.

8．We come from numerous backgrounds and we don't always approve of each other's decisions, but we care for each other the best we can. We struggle to be less self-indulgent, more compassionate and understanding. We try to resist the lure of novelty fads, the manipulations of advertising. We survive through social phenomena that we don't agree with, through interwoven natural and unnatural disasters that take our loved ones and possessions, through fads and fancies that are often unhealthy. From each event, we learn, we stretch, we sometimes fracture, we process the emotional outcome, and we move on. These life events are the soul's workout, and though we may groan and complain, we can feel the growth eventually.

9．The secret is that this growth is visible to others, and the effort registers on one's entire being. It becomes an authentic element that makes the spirit glow radiantly like that of a saint. Have you ever seen an elderly person like that, one whose wisdom shows in his eyes, and whose love is evident as he gently enquires about your health, or offers a brief sentiment that calms and affirms? The spirit that shines from within this person is true beauty, and it can't be bought in a jar.

10．The miracle is that each of us has the total capacity to achieve this perspective, this fullest embodiment of the highest expression of soul, even as our mortal bodies wear out and degenerate.

11．In other words, true beauty is not about looks. It's about choices. As we move through life and grow through each of its checkpoints, we should seek out and build the kinds of experiences that reveal and purify our divine inner beauty. We must look at our own lives and decisions from a more valuable perspective than the media's shallow eye.

12．The decisions we make today affect the rest of our lives. We ourselves are ultimately the only people to whom we are accountable and for whom we are responsible. Each new decision we make can be a new resolution to build the beautiful future we long to have.

It's happened to all of us. Dinner's over and you're stuffed.

But then someone brings out the pie and ice cream.

And while a moment ago you couldn't have eaten another bite, suddenly…

well, of course you can find room for a little pie.

And it's actually kind of true that you always have room for dessert.

It has to do with how our bodies evolved—long before dessert existed the way we know now.

But once you understand why you always have room for dessert,

you'll see how you can use this weird quirk of your appetite to your advantage.

When it comes to our appetites in general, humans and other animals tend to get less pleasure

out of eating something the more they eat it.

This is called sensory specific satiety, and it's an example of habituation.

Whenever you encounter some stimulus over and over again, your response to it goes down.

It's like when you hear a great new song for the first time, and you love it—

but then after a few months of hearing it on the radio, you're just completely over it.

Our brains react the same way to food.

At first, a new food is really rewarding… but eventually, your brain gets tired of it.

And neuroscientists have actually watched that happen in real time.

In a 2001 study published in the journal Brain,

experimenters gave nine subjects a series of chocolates and scanned their brains while they ate them.

After every piece, the subjects rated how much they enjoyed the snack and how much they wanted another.

Even though they were eating the same kind of chocolate each time,

both of these ratings kept going down with every passing piece.

Not only that, but their brain activity changed, too —

specifically in the orbitofrontal cortex, which processes sensory and emotional information.

In one spot, there was less activity over time, suggesting it was reacting to how rewarding the chocolate was.

But in another spot there was more activity, suggesting that it was a sign of an increased sense of revulsion or punishment.

To chocolate.

Because it had just had enough.

And a number of studies have shown similar results

When people fill up on one thing, even if it's something they like, they begin to feel repulsed by it.

But even if they can't stomach any more of that one thing, their brains don't have the same reaction to other food.

So when it comes to finding room for dessert, something similar seems to be going on.

See, if you've had a well-balanced meal, you've probably filled up on vegetables, proteins, and complex carbs—so your body's had enough of that.

But dessert is different. It doesn't have a lot of those things, and it usually has a lot more sugar.

And your brain's not tired of that yet, so suddenly, you're not as full as you thought.

As weird as that seems, it might have been kind of an advantage from an evolutionary perspective.

We don't know exactly why we evolved this trait, but in the past,the fact that we sought out variety might have meant we were better at eating a balanced diet, and weren't missing key nutrients.

There's also one other factor that makes it especially easy to make room for dessert.

Dessert just doesn't fill you up the same way as other food.

Typically, you know you're hungry because your stomach releases a hormone called ghrelin,

which alerts the brain that you need food.

Then as you eat, the amount of ghrelin in your blood goes down, and you start to feel less hungry.

But that change in the amount of ghrelin depends on what you've eaten.

Complex carbs and proteins cause a significant drop, but sugar barely changes your ghrelin level at all.

Eating just simple sugars is almost as insignificant to your appetite as drinking water.

And let's face it—most desserts are basically sugar.

So, not only is your brain not tired of it, but as you eat, dessert just doesn't fill you up as much.

Your body does have other ways of informing you that it's full,

like by using special receptors to sense how stretched or contracted your stomach is, so eventually you would feel full no matter what.

But if you're still feeling betrayed by your brain for letting you eat more dessert than you intended, think about it this way.

You can also use all this to your advantage.

For example, sensory-specific satiety does make it easier to squeeze in dessert,

but you can also take advantage of it to squeeze other foods into your diet.

Like, maybe you bought something healthy for snacking, like a bag of almonds,

but now you're just tired of those, and the junk food is calling to you.

Well, if you have a variety of healthy snacks, you have a better chance of actually wanting to eat them.

In a 2013 study in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers tested a similar thing on kids.

During preschool snack time, they put out different fruits and vegetables and tracked what the children ate.

If they just put out one kind of fruit or vegetable, about 70% of kids took a snack.

But if they put out a variety, 94% did—and they ate about three more pieces of fruit on average.

So if you've ever struggled to get a picky kid to eat some vegetables, variety might help!

And when it is time for dessert, if you're trying to scale back, you can try avoiding eating sugars on their own.

Like, you could have your ice cream with fruit or add oats to your cookies—and it may help you feel fuller for longer.

If nothing else, it's good to know that it's not your imagination.

Your body really does react a little differently to dessert at the end of a meal. And at the very least, knowing how it works might help you trick yourself to eating a little better.

Fred Smith and FedEx: The vision that changed the world

Every night several hundred planes bearing a purple, white, and orange design touch down at Memphis Airport, in Tennessee. What precedes this landing are package pickups from locations all over the United States earlier in the day. Crews unload the planes' cargo of more than half a million parcels and letters. The rectangular packages and envelopes are rapidly reshuffled and sorted according to address, then loaded onto other aircraft, and flown to their destinations to be dispersed by hand - many within 24 hours of leaving their senders. This is the culmination of a dream of Frederick W. Smith, the founder, president, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board of the FedEx Corp. - known originally as Federal Express - the largest and most successful overnight delivery service in the world. Conceived when he was in college and now in its 28th year of operation, Smith's exquisite brainchild has become the standard for door-to-door package delivery.
Recognized as an outstanding entrepreneur with an agreeable and winning personality, Smith is held in high regard by his competitors as well as his employees and stockholders. Fred Smith was just 27 when he founded FedEx. Now, so many years later, he's still the "captain of the ship". He attributes the success the company simply to leadership, something he deduced from his years in the military, and from his family.
Frederick Wallace Smith was born into a wealthy family clan on August 11, 1944 in Mississippi. His father died when he was just four years old. As a juvenile, Smith was an invalid, suffering from a disease that left him unable to walk normally. He was picked on by bullies, and he learned to defend himself by swinging at them with his alloy walking stick. Cured of the disease by the age of 10, he became a star athlete in high school, playing football, basketball, and baseball.
Smith's passion was flying. At 15, he was operating a crop-duster over the skyline of the Mississippi Delta, a terrain so flat that there was little need for radar navigation. As a student at Yale University, he helped revive the Yale flying club; its alumni had populated naval aviation history, including the famous "Millionaires' Unit" in World War I. Smith administrated the club's business end and ran a small charter operation in New Haven.
With his study time disrupted by flying, his academic performance suffered, but Smith never stopped looking for his own "big idea". He thought he had found it when he wrote a term paper for an economics class. He drafted a prototype for a transportation company that would guarantee overnight delivery of small, time-sensitive goods, such as replacement parts and medical supplies, to major US regions. The professor wasn't impressed and told Smith he couldn't quantify the idea and clearly it wasn't feasible.
However, Smith was certain he was onto something, even though several more years elapsed before he could turn his idea into reality. In the interim, he graduated from Yale in 1966, just as America's involvement in the Vietnam War was deepening. Since he was a patriot and had attended officers' training classes, he joined the Marines.
Smith completed two tours in Vietnam, eventually flying more than 200 missions. "In the military, leadership means getting a group of people to subordinate their individual desires and ambitions for the achievement of organizational goals," Smith says, fusing together his military and business experiences. "And good leadership has very measurable effects on a company's bottom line."

Home from Vietnam, Smith became fascinated by the notion that if you connected all the points of a network through an intermediary hub, the streamlined efficient could be enormous compared to other disjointed, decentralized businesses, whether the system involved moving packages and letters or people and planes. He decided to take a stab at starting his own business. With an investment from his father's company, as well as a chunk of his own inheritance, Smith bought his first delivery planes and in 1971 formed the Federal Express.
The early days were underscored by extreme frugality and financial losses. It was not uncommon for FedEx drivers to pay for gasoline for their vans out of their own pockets. But despite such problems, Smith showed concern for the welfare of his employees. Just as he recalled, even when they didn't have the money, even when there weren't couches in the office and electric typewriters, they still set the precedent to ensure a good medical and dental plan for their people.
Along the way, FedEx pioneered centralization and the "hub and spoke" system, which has since been adopted by almost all major airlines. The phrase FedEx it has become a fixture in our language as much as Xerox or Google.
Smith says success in business boils down to three things. First, you need to have appealing product or service and a compelling strategy. Then you need to have an efficient management system. Assuming you have those things, leading a team is the single most important issue in running an organization today.
Although Smith avoids the media and the trappings of public life, he is said to be a friendly and accessible employer. He values his people and never takes them for granted. He reportedly visits FedEx's Memphis site at night from time to time and addresses sorters by name. For years he extended an offer to any courier with 10 years of service to come to Memphis for an "anniversary breakfast". That embodies Fred Smith's philosophy: People, Service, Profit (P-S-P). Smith says, "The P-S-P philosophy is like an unbroken circle or chain. There are no clearly definable points of entry or exit. Each link upholds the others and is, in turn, supported by them." In articulating this philosophy and in personally involving himself in its implementation, Frederick Smith is the forerunner of the new sphere of leadership that success in the future will demand.

Building the dream of Starbucks

Howard Schultz is not a household name to most North Americans, but those living in urban or suburban communities know his company: the specialty coffee retailer Starbucks. With impressive velocity, Starbucks has grown into the largest coffee roaster and retailer of specialty coffee in North America in a span of only a decade. By 2000, its coffee houses could be found in more than 3,000 locations worldwide; even President Bill Clinton was seen in a snapshot with a Starbucks brew in his hand. According to the US weekly magazine, Newsweek, Schultz's merging of the three Cs - coffee, commerce and community - surely ranks as one of the '90s greatest retail successes.
Schultz was born in 1953 and grew up in an extremely poor section of the Brooklyn borough of New York City. His mother worked as a receptionist, and his father held a variety of jobs, none of which offered decent pay or medical insurance. When Schultz was seven, his father lost his job as a delivery driver when he broke his ankle in an accident. In the ensuing months, the family was literally too poor to put food on the table.
During his youth, Schultz was hounded by the shame of his family's "working poor" status. He escaped the hot Brooklyn summer one year to attend camp, but would not return when he learned it was for low-income families. He was teased by boys in high school and ashamed to tell his girlfriend where he lived. The harsh memories of those early times stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Sports became an escape from the shame of poverty. Schultz earned an athletic scholarship to Northern Michigan University in 1975. He was the first person in his family to graduate from college as none of his predecessors had training beyond vocational school.
The bud of inspiration for his phenomenal coffee business began growing in a 1983 visit to Milan, Italy. Schultz conceived of a new American way of life in the coffee bars of Milan. He sought to recreate such forums for people in the US to start their days or visit with friends. In 1987, at the age of 34, Schultz organized a group of investors and purchased the company that had formerly employed him, the Starbucks Coffee Company in Seattle, which he restructured as the Starbucks Corporation.
The public verdict was overwhelmingly positive. Schultz's premium coffee bars were an instant success, acting as a stimulus of rapid growth and expansion not only for Starbucks but also for the coffee industry around the world. In 1992, Starbucks became the first specialty coffee company to go public, affirming its magnitude and prospects.
Starbucks' first major venture outside of the northwestern part of the nation was Chicago, where the company's specialty sales division developed new business with department stores and established Starbucks coffee bars adjacent to the business sections in national bookstores. Starbucks also formed a partnership with PepsiCo to create and distribute a new ready-to-drink coffee-based beverage, and entered into a licensing agreement with Kraft Foods. As a company seeking to develop with a multilateral approach, Starbucks even developed a relationship with the music industry to sell Starbucks-tailored CDs of classical brass and orchestral music in the coffee bars.
When Starbucks opened its first store in New York City, it was a homecoming for Schultz, but he did not act like the head of the reigning royalty of coffee he had become. The New York Times commented, "The soft-spoken Mr. Schultz has barely a trace of a New York accent and a timid, almost apologetic manner.
Schultz has also attracted considerable attention with his unconventional employment policies. He wanted to give Starbucks' employees both a philosophical and a financial stake in the business. He decreed that employees who worked the quota of 20 hours a week or more were eligible for medical, dental, and optical coverage as well as for stock options. At a time when other companies were trimming benefits as a cost-cutting measure, Schultz, who grew up in a family without any medical coverage, was vocal in his belief that genuinely caring about your employees is critical to building a sturdy workforce. "Service is a lost art in America," he told The New York Times. "I think people want to do a good job, but if they are treated poorly they get beaten down. We want to provide our people with dignity and self-esteem, and we can't do that with lip service." Starbucks stipulates that every employee with at least half-time hours can receive health-care benefits. Schultz credits the utilization of such a benefits policy as the key to the company's growth because it has given Starbucks a more dedicated workforce and an extremely high level of customer service. The chain also achieved a dramatically low turnover rate, half that of the average fast food business. This creates a significant numerical payoff for Starbucks, since each new employee represents an expenditure of $3,000 in recruiting and training costs and productivity losses.
Schultz has remained firmly committed to employee and community enrichment, a philosophy which is embedded in the very core of Starbucks' business culture. He has never grown accustomed to success enough to forget his working-class roots. He dedicated his book to the memory of his father, whom he had once spoken harshly to and accused of a lack of ambition. They were words Schultz would regret the rest of his life, a reminiscence he wished he could scrub from his memory. His father received the diagnosis of lung cancer and died before his son became a millionaire. Schultz once told his audience that his crowning success was that "I got to build the kind of company that my father never got to work for."

In the lush rainforests of Australia, birds roost in the low branches and amble across the forest floor, enjoying the shade and tropical fruits.

But the jungle isn't theirs alone. A dingo is prowling in the shadows, and fruit won't satisfy his appetite.

The birds flee to safety all but the cassowary, who can't clear the ground on her puny wings.

Instead, she attacks, sending the dingo running for cover with one swipe of her razor-sharp toe claws.

The cassowary is one of approximately 60 living species of flightless birds.

These earthbound avians live all over the world, from the Australian outback to the African savanna to Antarctic shores.

They include some species of duck and all species of penguin, secretive swamp dwellers and speedy ostriches, giant emus, and tiny kiwis.

Though the common ancestor of all modern birds could fly, many different bird species have independently lost their flight.

Flight can have incredible benefits, especially for escaping predators, hunting, and traveling long distances.

But it also has high costs: it consumes huge amounts of energy and limits body size and weight.

A bird that doesn't fly conserves energy, so it may be able to survive on a scarcer or less nutrient-rich food source than one that flies.

The Takahe of New Zealand, for example, lives almost entirely on the soft base of alpine grasses.

For birds that nest or feed on the ground, this predisposition to flightlessness can be even stronger.

When a bird species doesn't face specifc pressures to fly, it can stop flying in as quickly as a few generations.

Then, over thousands or millions of years, the birds' bodies change to match this new behavior.

Their bones, once hollow to minimize weight, become dense.

Their sturdy feathers turn to fluff. Their wings shrink, and in some cases disappear entirely.

And the keel-like protrusion on their sternums, where the flight muscles attach, shrinks or disappears,

except in penguins, who repurpose their flight muscles and keels for swimming.

Most often, flightlessness evolves after a bird species flies to an island where there are no predators.

As long as these predator-free circumstances last, the birds thrive, but they are vulnerable to changes in their environment.

For instance, human settlers bring dogs, cats, and stowaway rodents to islands.

These animals often prey on flightless birds and can drive them to extinction.

In New Zealand, stoats introduced by European settlers have threatened many native species of flightless bird.

Some have gone extinct while others are endangered.

So in spite of the energy-saving advantages of flightlessness, many flightless bird species have only a short run before going the way of the dodo.

But a few flightless birds have survived on mainlands alongside predators aplenty.

Unlike most small flightless species that come and go quickly, these giants have been flightless for tens of millions of years.

Their ancestors appeared around the same time as the first small mammals,

and they were probably able to survive because they were evolving – and growing – at the same time as their mammalian predators.

Most of these birds, like emus and ostriches, ballooned in size, weighing hundreds of pounds more than wings can lift.

Their legs grew thick, their feet sturdy, and newly developed thigh muscles turned them into formidable runners.

Though they no longer use them to fly, many of these birds repurpose their wings for other means.

They can be spotted tucking their heads beneath them for warmth, flashing them at prospective mates,

sheltering eggs with them, or even using them to steer as they charge across the plains.

They may be flightless, but they're still winging it.

Achieving sustainable environmentalism

Environmental sensitivity is now as required an attitude in polite society as is, say, belief in democracy or disapproval of plastic surgery. But now that everyone from Ted Turner to George H. W. Bush has claimed love for Mother Earth, how are we to choose among the dozens of conflicting proposals, regulations and laws advanced by congressmen and constituents alike in the name of the environment? Clearly, not everything with an environmental claim is worth doing. How do we segregate the best options and consolidate our varying interests into a single, sound policy?
There is a simple way. First, differentiate between environmental luxuries and environmental necessities. Luxuries are those things that would be nice to have if costless. Necessities are those things we must have regardless. Call this distinction the definitive rule of sane environmentalism, which stipulates that combating ecological change that directly threatens the health and safety of people is an environmental necessity. All else is luxury.
For example, preserving the atmosphere - stopping ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect - is an environmental necessity. Recently, scientists reported that ozone damage is far worse than previously thought. Ozone depletion has a correlation not only with skin cancer and eye problems, it also destroys the ocean's ecology, the beginning of the food chain atop which we humans sit.
The possible thermal consequences of the greenhouse effect are far deadlier: melting ice caps, flooded coastlines, disrupted climate, dry plains and, ultimately, empty breadbaskets. The American Midwest feeds people at all corners of the atlas. With the planetary climate changes, are we prepared to see Iowa take on New Mexico's desert climate, or Siberia take on Iowa's moderate climate?
Ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect are human disasters, and they are urgent because they directly threaten humanity and are not easily reversible. A sane environmentalism, the only kind of environmentalism that will strike a chord with the general public, begins by openly declaring that nature is here to serve human beings. A sane environmentalism is entirely a human focused regime: It calls upon humanity to preserve nature, but merely within the parameters of self-survival.
Of course, this human focus runs against the grain of a contemporary environmentalism that indulges in overt earth worship. Some people even allege that the earth is a living organism. This kind of environmentalism likes to consider itself spiritual. It is nothing more than sentimental. It takes, for example, a highly selective view of the kindness of nature, one that is incompatible with the reality of natural disasters. My nature worship stops with the twister that came through Kansas or the dreadful rains in Bangladesh that eradicated whole villages and left millions homeless.
A non-sentimental environmentalism is one founded on Protagoras's idea that "Man is the measure of all things." In establishing the sovereignty of man, such a principle helps us through the dense forest of environmental arguments. Take the current debate raging over oil drilling in a corner of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Environmentalist coalitions, mobilizing against a legislative action working its way through the US Congress for the legalization of such exploration, propagate that Americans should be preserving and economizing energy instead of drilling for it. This is a false either-or proposition. The US does need a sizable energy tax to reduce consumption. But it needs more production too. Government estimates indicate a nearly fifty-fifty chance that under the ANWR rests one of the five largest oil fields ever discovered in America. It seems illogical that we are not finding safe ways to drill for oil in the ANWR.
The US has just come through a war fought in part over oil. Energy dependence costs Americans not just dollars but lives. It is a bizarre sentimentalism that would deny oil that is peacefully attainable because it risks disrupting the birthing grounds of Arctic caribou.
I like the caribou as much as the next person. And I would be rather sorry if their mating patterns were disturbed. But you can't have your cake and eat it too. And in the standoff of the welfare of caribou versus reducing an oil reliance that gets people killed in wars, I choose people over caribou every time.
I feel similarly about the spotted owl in Oregon. I am no enemy of the owl. If it could be preserved at a negligible cost, I would agree that it should be - biodiversity is after all necessary to the ecosystem. But we must remember that not every species is needed to keep that diversity. Sometimes aesthetic aspects of life have to be sacrificed to more fundamental ones. If the cost of preserving the spotted owl is the loss of livelihood for 30,000 logging families, I choose the families (with their saws and chopped timber) over the owl.
The important distinction is between those environmental goods that are fundamental and those that are not. Nature is our ward, not our master. It is to be respected and even cultivated. But when humans have to choose between their own well-being and that of nature, nature will have to accommodate.
Humanity should accommodate only when its fate and that of nature are inseparably bound up. The most urgent maneuver must be undertaken when the very integrity of humanity's habitat, e.g., the atmosphere or the essential geology that sustains the core of the earth, is threatened. When the threat to humanity is lower in the hierarchy of necessity, a more modest accommodation that balances economic against health concerns is in order. But in either case the principle is the same: protect the environment - because it is humanity's environment.
The sentimental environmentalists will call this saving nature with a totally wrong frame of mind. Exactly. A sane and intelligible environmentalism does it not for nature's sake but for our own.

What nature is telling you

Let's sit down here, all of us, on the open prairie, where we can't see a highway or a fence, free from the debris of the city. Let's have no blankets to sit on, but let our bodies converge with the earth, the surrounding trees and shrubs. Let's have the vegetation for a mattress, experiencing its texture, its sharpness and its softness. Let us become like stones, plants, and trees. Let us be animals, think and feel like animals.
This is my plea: Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it. We feel it between us, as a presence presiding over the day. It is a good way to start thinking about nature and talking about it. To go further, we must rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our relatives.
You have impaired our ability to experience nature in the good way, as part of it. Even here we are conscious that somewhere beyond the marsh and its cranes, somewhere out in those hills there are radar towers and highway overpasses. This land is so beautiful and strange that now some of you want to make it into a national park. You have not only contaminated the earth, the rocks, the minerals, all of which you call "dead" but which are very much alive; you have even changed the animals, which are part of us, changed them into vulgar zoological mutations, so no one can recognize them.
There is power in an antelope, so you let it graze within your fences. But what power do you see in a goat or sheep, prey animals with no defenses, creatures that hold still while you slaughter them? There was great power in a wolf, even in a fox. You have inverted nature and turned these noble animals into miniature lap dogs. Nature is bound by your ropes and whips and is obedient to your commands. You can't do much with a cat, so you fix it, alter it, declaw it, and even cut its vocal cords so that you can experiment on it in a laboratory without being disturbed by its cries.
You have also made all types of wild birds into chickens - creatures with wings so impaired that they cannot fly. There are farms where you breed chickens for breast meat. Those birds are kept in low, repressive cages, forced to be hunched over all the time, which makes the breast muscles very big. One loud noise and the chickens go mad, killing themselves by flying against the walls of their cages. Having to spend all their lives stooped over makes an unnatural, crazy, no-good bird. It also makes unnatural, detached, no-good human beings.
That's where you've fooled yourselves. You have not only altered, declawed, and deformed your winged and four-legged cousins; you have done it concurrently to yourselves. You inject Botox, or use plastic surgery, synthetic make-up and countless drugs. You have filtered and remolded humans into executives sitting in boardrooms, into office workers, into time-clock punchers. Your homes are filled with families disconnected from one another but tied to one great entity, television.
"Watch the ashes, don't smoke, you'll stain the curtains. Watch the goldfish bowl. Don't lean your head against the wallpaper; your hair may be greasy. Don't spill liquor on that table: You'll peel off its delicate finish. You should have wiped your boots; the floor was just cleaned. Don't, don't, don't …" That is absurd! We weren't made to endure this type of repression. You live in prisons which you have built for yourselves, calling them "homes", offices, factories.
Sometimes I think that even our pitiful small houses are better than your luxury mansions. Strolling a hundred feet to the outhouse on a clear wintry night, through mud or snow, that's one small link with nature. Or in the summer, in the back country, taking your time, listening to the humming of the insect or the flapping of birds' wings, the sun warming your bones through the nodding branches of trees; you don't even have that pleasure of coexistence with nature anymore.
You subscribe to the belief that everything must be germ free. No smells! Not even the good, natural man and woman odors. Eradicate the smell from under your armpits, from your skin. Rub it out, and then spray some botanical odor on yourself, stuff you can spend a lot of money on, ten dollars an ounce, so you know this has to smell good. Why do you keep such a distance from your bodies functions, cavities and smells that you've alienated yourselves from the natural world, of which you are an integral part?
I think you are so afraid and intolerant of the world around you. You deplore the natural world; you don't want to see, feel, smell, or hear it. The feelings of rain and snow on your face, being numbed by an icy wind and warmed back up by a smoking fire, coming out of a hot sweat bath and plunging into a cold stream, these things are the spice of life, but you don't want them anymore.
You're cage dwellers, living in boxes which shut out the hot humidity of the summer and the chill of winter, living inside a body that no longer has a scent. You're hearing the noise from the hi-fi instead of listening to the sounds of nature. You're watching actors on TV having a make-believe experience when you no longer anything for yourself. That's your way. It's no good.

What if you own a hotel, and one of the key principles in your mission statement is a commitment to treat all employees and customers equally,

including on the basis of gender and religion?

And then a large group books an event at your space, and when you look at the booking, you realize it's a religious group,

and one of their key principles is that women should never leave the home and should have no opportunities for professional development outside of it.

What do you do? Do you host the event and get criticized by some, or refuse and get criticized by others?

In my work, I counsel organizations on how to create rules to navigate ideological disagreement and controversial speech,

and I defend my clients, whether in court or from the government, when their actions are challenged.

The structures I recommend recognize the real harms that can come from certain types of speech,

but at the same time, seek to promote dialogue rather than shut it down.

The reason is that we need disagreement. Creativity and human progress depend on it.

While it may be often easier to speak with someone who agrees with everything you say,

it's more enlightening and oftentimes more satisfying to speak with someone who doesn't.

But disagreement and discord can have real and meaningful costs.

Disagreement, particularly in the form of hateful speech, can lead to deep and lasting wounds and sometimes result in violence.

And in a world in which polarization and innovation are increasing at seemingly exponential rates,

the need to create structures for vigorous but not violent disagreement have never been more important.

The US Constitution's First Amendment might seem like a good place to start to go to look for answers.

You, like I, may have often heard somebody say that some form of a speech restriction,

whether from an employer, a website, or even somebody else, "violates" the First Amendment.

But in fact, the First Amendment usually has little if any relevance at all.

The First Amendment only applies when the government is seeking to suppress the speech of its citizens.

As a result, the First Amendment is by design a blunt instrument.

A narrow category of speech can be banned based on its content. Almost everything else cannot.

But the First Amendment has no relevance when what we're talking about is a private entity regulating speech.

And that's a good thing, because it means private entities have at their disposal a broad and flexible set of tools that don't prohibit speech,

but do make speakers aware of the consequences of their words.

Here are some examples. When you go to university, it's a time for the free and unrestricted exchange of ideas.

But some ideas and the words used to express them can cause discord,

whether it's an intentionally inflammatory event hosted by a student group or the exploration of a controversial issue in class.

In order to protect both intellectual freedom and their most vulnerable students,

some universities have formed teams that bring speaker and listener together, free from the possibility of any sanction, to hear each other's viewpoints.

Sometimes students don't want to meet, and that's fine.

But in other circumstances, mediated exposure to an opposing view

can result in acknowledgment, recognition of unintended consequences and a broadening of perspectives.

Here's an example. On a college campus, a group of students supporting the Israelis and those supporting the Palestinians

were constantly reporting each other for disrupting events, tearing down posters and engaging in verbal confrontations.

Recognizing that most of what the students were reporting did not violate the university's disciplinary code,

the university invited both groups to sit down in a so-called "restorative circle,"

where they could hear each other's viewpoints, free from the possibility of sanction.

After the meeting, the ideological disagreements between the groups remained as stark as ever, but the rancor between them significantly dissipated.

Now, obviously, this doesn't always happen.

But by separating reactions to speech from the disciplinary system,

institutions of higher education have created a space for productive disagreement and a broadening of perspectives.

We're all biased. I don't mean that in a bad way.

All of us are influenced, and rightly so, by our family background, our education, our lived experience and a million other things.

Organizations, too, have influences, most importantly, the beliefs of their members,

but also the laws under which they're governed or the marketplace in which they compete.

These influences can form a critical part of a corporate identity, and they can be vital for attracting and retaining talent.

But these "biases," as I'm calling them, can also be a challenge,

particularly when what we're talking about is drawing lines for allowing some speech and not allowing others.

The temptation to find speech harmful or disruptive simply because we disagree with it is real.

But equally real is the harm that can come from certain types of expression.

In this situation, third parties can help. Remember the hotel, trying to decide whether or not to allow the religious group to host its event?

Rather than having to make a complex, on-the-spot decision about that group's identity and message,

the hotel could instead rely on a third party, say, for example, the Southern Poverty Law Center,

which has a list of hate groups in the United States, or indeed even its own outside group of experts brought together from diverse backgrounds.

By relying on third parties to draw lines outside the context of a particular event,

organizations can make content decisions without being accused of acting in self-interest or bias.

The line between facts and opinions is a hazy one.

The internet provides the opportunity to publish almost any position on any topic under the sun.

And in some ways, that's a good thing. It allows for the expression of minority viewpoints and for holding those in power accountable.

But the ability to self-publish freely means that unverified or even flat-out false statements

can quickly gain circulation and currency, and that is very dangerous.

The decision to take down a post or ban a user is a tough one.

It certainly can be appropriate at times, but there are other tools available as well to foster productive and yet responsible debate.

Twitter has recently started labeling tweets as misleading, deceptive or containing unverified information.

Rather than block access to those tweets, Twitter instead links to a source that contains more information about the claims made.

A good and timely example is its coronavirus page, which has up-to-the-minute information about the spread of the virus and what to do if you contract it.

To me, this approach makes a ton of sense. Rather than shutting down dialogue, this brings more ideas, facts and context to the forum.

And, if you know that your assertions are going to be held up against more authoritative sources,

it may create incentives for more responsible speech in the first place.

Let me end with a hard truth: the structures I've described can foster productive debate while isolating truly harmful speech.

But inevitably, some speech is going to fall in a grey area, perhaps deeply offensive but also with the potential to contribute to public debate.

In this situation, I think as a general matter, the tie should go to allowing more rather than less speech.

Here's why. For one, there's always the risk that an innovative or creative idea gets squelched because it seems unfamiliar or dangerous.

Almost by definition, innovative ideas challenge orthodoxies about how things should be.

So if an idea seems offensive or dangerous, it could be because it is, or it might simply be because we're scared of change.

But let me suggest that even if speech has little to no value at all, that deficiency should be shown through open debate rather than suppression.

To be very clear: false speech can lead to devastating real-world harms,

from the burning of women accused of being witches in Europe in the 15th century

to the lynching of African Americans in the American South, to the Rwandan Genocide.

The idea that the remedy for false speech is more speech isn't always true.

But I do think more often than not, more speech can help.

A famous story from First Amendment case law shows why.

In 1977, a group of neo-Nazis wanted to stage a march through the leafy, peaceful suburb of Skokie, Illinois,

home to a significant number of Holocaust survivors.

The City Council immediately passed ordinances trying to block the Nazis, and the Nazis sued.

The case made it all the way up to the US Supreme Court and back down again.

The courts held that the neo-Nazis had the right to march, and that they could display their swastikas and give their salutes while doing so.

But when the day for the march came, and after all that litigation, just 20 neo-Nazis showed up in front of the Federal Building in Chicago, Illinois,

and they were met by 2,000 counter-protesters responding to the Nazis' messages of hate with ones of inclusion.

As the Chicago Tribune noted, the Nazi march sputtered to an unspectacular end after 10 minutes.

The violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and indeed around the world, shows this isn't always how these stories end.

But to me, the Skokie story is a good one, one that shows that the fallacy and moral bankruptcy of hateful speech

can best be responded to not through suppression but through the righteous power of countervailing good and noble ideas. Thank you.

Speaking Chinese in America

Once, at a dinner on the Monterey Peninsula, California, my mother whispered to me confidentially: "Sau-sau (brother's wife) pretends too hard to be a polite recipient! Why bother with such nominal courtesy? In the end, she always takes everything."
My mother acted like a waixiao, an emigrant, no longer patient with old taboos and courtesies. To prove her point, she reached across the table to offer my elderly aunt from Beijing the last scallop from the garlic seafood dish, along with the flank steak and the cucumber salad.
Sau-sau frowned. "B'yao, zhen b'yao!" she cried, patting her substantial stomach. I don't want it, really I don't.
"Take it! Take it!" my mother scolded in Chinese, as predictably as the lunar cycles.
"Full, I'm already full," Sau-sau muttered weakly, eying the scallop.
"Ai!" exclaimed my mother. "Nobody wants it. It will only rot!"
Sau-sau sighed, acting as if she were doing my mother a favor by taking the scrap off the tray and sparing us the trouble of wrapping the leftovers in foil.
My mother turned to her brother, an experienced Chinese magistrate, visiting us for the first time. "In America, a Chinese person could starve to death. If you don't breach the old rules of etiquette and say you want it, they won't ask you again."
My uncle nodded and said he understood fully: Americans take things quickly because they have no time to be polite.
I read an article in The New York Times Magazine on changes in New York's little cultural colony of Chinatown, where the author mentioned that the interwoven configuration of Chinese language and culture renders its speech indirect and polite. Chinese people are so "discreet and modest", the article started, that there aren't even words for "yes" and "no".
Why do people keep fabricating these rumors? I thought. They describe us as though we were a tribe of those little dolls sold in Chinatown tourist shops, heads moving up and down in contented agreement!
As any child of immigrant parents knows, there is a special kind of double bind attached to knowing two languages. My parents, for example, spoke to me in both Chinese and English; I spoke back to them in English.
"Amy-ah!" they'd scold me.
"what?" I'd answer back.
"Do not question us when we call," they'd scold in Chinese. "It's not respectful."
"what do you mean?"
"Ai! Didn't we just tell you not to question?" is If I consider my upbringing carefully, I find there was nothing discreet about the Chinese language I grew up with, no censorship for the sake of politeness. My parents made everything abundantly clear in their consecutive demands: "Of course you will become a famous aerospace engineer, they prodded." And yes, a concert pianist on the side."
It seems that the more forceful proceedings always spilled over into Chinese: "Not that way! You must wash rice so not a single grain is lost."
Having listened to both Chinese and English, I'm suspicious of comparisons between the two languages, as I notice the reciprocal challenges they each present. English speakers say Chinese is extremely difficult because different words can be denoted by very subtle variations in tone. English is often bracketed with the label of inconsistency, a language of too many broken rules.
Even more dangerous, in my view, is the temptation to view the gulf between different languages and behavior in translation. To listen to my mother speak English, an outside spectator might make the deduction that she has no concept of the temporal differences of past and future or that she is gender blind because she refers to my husband as "she". If one were not careful, one might also generalize that all Chinese people take an indirect route to get to the point. It is, rather, my mother's individual tendency to ornament her language and wander around a bit.
I worry that the dominant society may see Chinese people from a limited perspective, hedging us in with the stereotype. I worry that the seemingly innocent stereotype may lead to actual intolerance and be part of the reason why there are few Chinese in top management positions, or in the main judiciary or political sectors. I worry about the power of language: If one says anything enough times, it might become true, with or without malicious intent.
Could this be why the Chinese friends of my parents' generation are willing to accept the generalization?
"why are you complaining?" one of them said to me." If people think we are modest and polite, let them think that. Wouldn't Americans appreciate such an honorary description?"
And I do believe that anyone would take the description as a compliment - at first. But after a while, it annoys, as if the only things that people heard one say were what had been filtered through the sieve of social niceties: I'm so pleased to meet you. I've heard many wonderful things about you.
These remarks are not representative of new ideas, honest emotions, or considered thought. Like a piece of bread, they are only the crust of the interaction, or what is said from the polite distance of social contexts: greetings, farewells, convenient excuses, and the like. This generalization, therefore, is not a true composite of Chinese culture but only a stereotype of our exterior behavior.
"So how does one say 'yes' and 'no' in Chinese?" my friends may ask carefully.
At this junction, I do agree in part with The New York Times Magazine article. There is no one word for "yes" or "no", but not out of necessity to be discreet. If anything, I would say the Chinese equivalent of answering "yes" or "no" is specific to what is asked.
Ask a Chinese person if he or she has eaten, and he or she might say chrle (eaten already) or meiyou (have not).
Ask, "Have you stopped beating your wife?" and the answer refers directly to the proposition being asserted or denied: stopped already, still have not, never beat, have no wife.

What could be clearer?

Culture makes the business world go round

Edward Hall, a leader in the field of intercultural studies, famously said: "The single greatest barrier to business success is the one erected by culture." Can cultural differences have as big an impact on international business ventures as financial planning and visionary leadership? The surprising answer is: Yes!
A good example is the role of relationships in business dealings. While relationships play only a minor role in US business culture, they play a major role in Asian, African, and Middle Eastern countries. In these cultures, in varying degrees, relationship building is like a torch that lights and guides the way for business to occur.
Let's take the example of Kevin Johnston, a senior vice-president of a US company specializing in hospitality management. Kevin was put in charge of finalizing a merger with a company in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Virtually all of the complicated negotiations had been completed. What remained was a 3-day trip to the UAE for face-to-face meetings between the partners to sign the paperwork and close the deal.
Kevin was determined that nothing would detain him from succeeding. He sent out a memorandum across his company, enthusiastically describing the planned merger with the UAE partners. Having compiled all the necessary documents and graphs, with every figure and decimal in place, and having prepared a thorough exposition certifying the quality of his company, he packed his briefcase and headed for the UAE.
Kevin arrived in the UAE excited to seal the deal. He was treated with extraordinary hospitality: an elaborate hotel, blue ribbon foods, elegant convertibles with drivers to tour the city, a parade of entertainment, and beautiful gifts to commemorate the visit. He tried repeatedly to bring out his files, open the conversation and get down to business. But, surprisingly, for the three days he spent in the UAE, none of his Emirate colleagues seemed ready to hear his financial briefing. Each time Kevin tried to speak about the deal, his prospective partners seemed to "kidnap" the conversation, diverting it to other topics. They would inquire about his health, his family or his views on education and other important issues.
Upon leaving the UAE, Kevin felt exasperated and defeated. He hadn't been able to receive the thorough interrogation of the materials for which he had so carefully prepared. His progress toward closing the deal was exactly where it was when he left the US: nil.
The above case is a classic example of how a friction between different cultural expectations causes delay that, if not handled appropriately, will bring the deal to an abrupt end and leave both sides reeling. The substantial loss of revenue can never be refunded and can leave a struggling company falling without a parachute.
Kevin made the mistake of assuming that the "certifications" involved in sealing the deal were in his briefcase. He charged into the meetings like a bull. For many cultures, a person's certifications are established not only by their accomplishments, their education and abilities, but also by more personal connections. In this case, the UAE partners wanted to know if Kevin was a good man, a family man, a trustworthy man. This type of rating establishes a trusting relationship for them. Had Kevin patiently taken the time to establish relationships, he would likely have been asked to share his carefully prepared documents and have closed the deal.
Sociologists agree that another key aspect influencing global business is the concept of face. Cross-cultural differences in the way we save face impact our perceptions of trust and respect, which in turn impact our relationships and group cohesion.
Take the example of Ann, a US manager who took a reactionary approach to cultural differences. Ann thought being a nominee for the leadership position with a sales team based in Singapore was a climax of her career. Ann tried to establish a working relationship with each team member. After a few weeks of working on team unification and solidarity, presenting guidelines, and offering sales advice, she carefully compartmentalized goals for each member of the sales team.
Later, when the team convened face-to-face for their first quarterly review meeting, Ann, after praising a Chinese team member, boldly criticized and questioned a Korean, trying to extract the exact reason why he was lagging so far behind on his goals. The meeting immediately lost its groove. The entire group became solemn and, for the rest of the meeting, remained polite but largely mute.
Clearly, Ann was not familiar with the concept of saving face in other cultures. In US culture, saving face exists - but only minimally, and tactful but straightforward speech is highly valued. US managers routinely speak freely about someone else's accomplishments or failures in open, public settings, such as during meetings. This is different in Asian cultures. Singling out an individual due to praise or criticism, a daily habit amongst American managers, may cause Asians to become uncomfortable or deeply embarrassed.
Ann needs to consider more culturally appropriate ways to support and motivate her team. Providing feedback, especially negative feedback, in more private settings will be helpful. Most of all, she should work on giving more courteous and supportive praise and encouragement, which will help move toward the unification and cohesion that high functioning teams need in order to be successful.
Around the world, deeper structures such as relationship building and face saving are embedded in the values, beliefs and behavior of a culture. They are much harder to understand than the glossary of terms in any culture's language phrase book. The advice is: Always ask for clarification and seek new insights. For business success, it is essential to learn to mediate these deeper cultural differences. Though it may be a little complicated to incorporate them into your way of thinking and communicating, it is well worth the effort!

Wales is a small but progressive country, the only country in the world to have legislated to protect the interests of future generations, the only country to have appointed someone independent to oversee this.

Across the world, our systems of government, of politics, of economics have tended to act in the short term.

And often, the decisions that are taken discount the interests of future generations and the planet.

But in Wales, we're trying to change that by passing a law which requires not just our government

but all of our main public institutions to demonstrate how they're acting for the long-term

and how the decisions they take don't harm the interests of those yet to be born.

And so as a mum of five and the world's only future generations commissioner,

I want to share with you today some of the lessons we've learned about how we're trying to leave the world better than we found it.

First of all, you must involve people in setting long-term goals.

Ask them: What's the Wales or the world you want to leave behind to your children and your grandchildren?

We held a national conversation – the Wales We Want – and people told us,

"We want a low-carbon economy. We want you to help us keep people well rather than just treat them when they're ill.

We want connected communities and a more equal Wales."

And our government legislated to set seven national well-being goals to achieve that.

Each institution has to demonstrate how they're meeting those goals, and they're held to account by me.

You have to focus on the interconnections between different aspects of well-being.

You need to talk often about why it's just as important to public health as it is to the environment to tackle high levels of air pollution,

why diversity in the workforce is just as important to economic prosperity as it is to addressing inequality.

Our institutions have a legal duty to act beyond their immediate remit to recognize those connections, work with unusual suspects.

And so we're seeing hospitals in Wales working with the National Botanic Gardens to create spaces for nature on their sites.

We're seeing offices in our environmental agency helping to find solutions to tackle childhood adversity.

Make well-being your metrics. Test everything you do across the four pillars of well-being: social, economic, environmental and cultural.

Because for too long, governments have tested their success on the measures of economic growth and increases in GVA.

But in Wales, our measures of success are around our seven well-being goals.

So when the government thought it was a good idea to spend 1.4 billion pounds building a new motorway,

a simple application of these well-being metrics told them that,

actually, if you want to improve people's health, if you want to meet your carbon emissions targets,

if you want to protect nature and if you want to direct your resources to those with the lowest incomes,

a much better option would be public transport and active travel.

And so that's what they're doing. Make it your mission to maximize your contribution to well-being.

So when we're seeing plans for economic stimulus in green jobs and energy efficiency measures in homes post-COVID, they're really good ideas.

But make sure you target those jobs towards those furthest from the labor market,

because otherwise, you'll be missing opportunities to address inequality, too.

Think about your projects holistically.

Don't save carbon by putting solar panels on your new hospital

and then spend it in another area by failing to consider how patients are going to travel there sustainably.

Well, in Cardiff, our capital city, like many others across the world,

we're blighted by high levels of air pollution, long commutes, congested roads and big differences in life expectancy between the richest and the poorest.

So what is our act doing to make a difference?

Well, first of all, it requires our public institutions to work together.

And so, as a result, the public health consultant was seconded from the health board to the local council to lead on the transportation strategy.

And when you apply a public health lens to a transport problem, you get a different set of solutions.

The public institutions realized that between them, they were employing 30,000 people in Cardiff,

so they're now incentivizing their employees to travel sustainably.

We've seen a tenfold increase in investment in safe routes to cycle and to walk,

and we've targeted that cycling and walking infrastructure towards those neighborhoods who have the highest level of air pollution and the lowest life expectancy.

And in Cardiff, doctors can issue prescriptions, not just for statins,

but for free bike hire for those who would benefit from increasing their physical activity.

And when we've constructed our cycling infrastructure, we've also built in sustainable drainage,

taking away over 40,000 cubic meters of water from an unsustainable drainage system through nature-based solutions.

And in doing that, we've created sites for nature, we've cleaned and greened communities, and we've transformed concrete jungles.

And when you travel from this area to our city center, you'll be met with areas which are closed off to traffic,

where people can meet and businesses can trade outside the splendor of our medieval castle.

So this is how we're embedding well-being in what we do in Wales.

This is how we're protecting the interests of future generations. This is how we're acting today for a better tomorrow.

The weight men carry

When I was a boy growing up off the grid in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the men I knew labored with their bodies from the first rooster crow in the morning to sundown. They were marginal farmers, shepherds, just scraping by, or welders, steelworkers, carpenters; they built cabinets, dug ditches, mined coal, or drove trucks, their forearms thick with muscle. They trained horses, stocked furnaces, made tires, stood on assembly lines, welding parts onto refrigerators or lubricating car engines. In the evenings and on weekends, they labored equally hard, working on their own small tract of land, fixing broken-down cars, repairing broken shutters and drafty windows. In their little free time, they drowned their livers in beer from cheap copper mugs at a bar near the local brewery or racecourse.
The bodies of the men I knew were twisted and wounded in ways visible and invisible. Heavy lifting had given many of them spinal problems and appalling injuries. Some had broken ribs and lost fingers. Racing against conveyor belts had given some ulcers. Their ankles and knees ached from years of standing on concrete. Some had partial vision loss as the glow of the welding flame damaged their optic receptors. There were times, studying them, when I dreaded growing up. All around us, the fathers always seemed older than the mothers. Men wore out sooner, being martyrs of constant work. Only women lived into old age.
There were also soldiers, and so far as I could tell, they scarcely worked at all. But when the shooting started, many of them would die for their patriotism in fields and forts of foreign outposts. This was what soldiers were for - they were tools like a wrench, a hammer or a screw.
These weren't the only destinies of men, as I learned from having a few male teachers, from reading books and from watching television. But the men on television - the news commentators, the lawyers, the doctors, the politicians who levied the taxes and the bosses who gave orders - seemed as remote and unreal to me as the figures in old paintings. I could no more imagine growing up to become one of these sophisticated people than I could imagine becoming a sovereign prince.
A scholarship enabled me not only to attend college, a rare enough feat in my social circle, but even to traverse the halls of a historic university meant for the children of the rich. Here for the first time I met women who told me that men were guilty of having kept all the joys and privileges of the earth for themselves. I was puzzled, and demanded clarification. What privileges? What joys? I thought about the grim, wounded lives of most of the men back home. What had they allegedly stolen from their wives and daughters? The right to work five days a week, 12 months a year, for 30 or 40 years, wedged in tight spaces in the textile mills, or in the coal mines, struggling to extract every last bit of coal from the rock-hard earth? The right to die in war? The right to fix every leak in the roof, every gap in the fence? The right to pile banknotes high for a rich corporation in a city far away? The right to feel, when the lay-off came or the mines shut down, not only afraid but also ashamed?
In this alien world of the rich, I was slow to understand the deep grievances of women. This was because, as a boy, I had envied them. Before college, the only people I had ever known who were interested in art or music or literature, the only ones who ever seemed to enjoy a sense of ease were the mothers and daughters. What's more, they did not have to go to war. By comparison with the narrow, compartmentalized days of fathers, the comparatively lightweight work of mothers seemed expansive. They clipped coupons, went to see neighbors, or ran errands at school or at church. I saw their lives as through a telescope, all twinkling stars and shafts of light, missing the details that truly defined their days. No doubt, had I taken a more deductive look at their lives, I would have envied them less. I didn't see, then, what a prison a house could be, since houses seemed to me brighter, handsomer places than any factory. As such things were never spoken of, I did not realize how often women suffered from men's bullying. Even then I could see how exhausting it was for a mother to cater all day to the needs of young children. But, as a boy, if I had to choose between tending a baby and tending a machine, I think I would have chosen the baby.
So I was baffled when the women at college made a racket accusing me and my sex of having cornered the world's pleasures. They demanded to be emancipated from the bonds of sexism. I think my bafflement has been felt by other boys (and by girls as well) who grew up in dirt-poor farm country, by the docks, in the shadows of factories - any place where the fates of men and women are symmetrically bleak and grim.
When the women I met at college thought about the joys and privileges of men, they didn't see the sort of men I had known. These daughters of privileged, Republican men wanted to inherit their fathers' power and lordship over the world. They longed for a say over their future. But so did I. The difference between me and these daughters was that they saw me, because of my sex, as destined from birth to become like their fathers, and therefore as an enemy to their desires. But I knew better. I wasn't an enemy to their desires, in fact or in feeling. I was an ally in their rebellion. If I had known, then, how to tell them so, or how to be a mediator, would they have believed me? Would they have known?

What does feminism really mean?

Imagine a world where skirts, makeup, and high heels are prohibited, where men are forbidden from giving gifts to women, where mothers ignore their children, and where marriage and dating are obscene. It sounds nightmarish, but this is the dogma many people have in mind when they hear the word "feminism". Feminists, we're told, hate men and want them dead. Or feminists want to switch places with men, so women can work all day and men can all stay home and keep house. Or maybe feminists want to be like men: dress identically, use the same toilets, compete in the same sports leagues. If this definition is true, it seems feminists would be the provocation for insurgencies across the whole of society, breaking routines, eradicating traditions and ruining everyone's lives in the process!
Fortunately, that's not feminism! Feminists don't believe that women are better than men or that women need to become or displace men. True, some feminists enjoy masculine pursuits like boxing, but they don't want to eject men from society. Feminists have fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons. Their lives are just as coiled up with those they love as anyone else's.
So, what do feminists believe? Distilled to its essence, feminism is the idea that men and women should have equal opportunities. A woman should be able to be a man's boss if she is as capable as any other manager, or a man should be allowed to look after children if he has the interest and ability. Nobody should find the situation strange or call it "queer". In other words, feminists believe in a world where no one feels colonized or oppressed because of the roles they fill.
In some countries, gender equality remains far away. There are places where women aren't allowed to participate in government or public life, where women are denied education and remain illiterate, and places where women have to keep their hair and faces hidden, or they will risk terrible lashes, detention, or even execution. There are places where young, virgin girls, with no judicial process to protect them, are forced to marry old men and bear children against their will. There are places where women are not allowed to drive a car or sit in the same section as men when using public transit.
In comparison, in some other parts of the world, the rights of women have grown tremendously. In the United States, modern women live downright luxurious lives compared to the Pilgrims in colonial times. And in the British Isles, modern women are essentially equal to men compared to the time when the early kings sat upon their mighty thrones. Feminists, men as well as women, have fought hard to overthrow outdated discriminatory practices and win rights we now take for granted, such as girls attending school, women gaining the voting ballot and running in electoral races for the Senate, women owning property, women in sales earning equal commissions as men, and women choosing whether or not to marry or have children. These rights have given women control over their own lives while increasing vastly the number of people in the workforce who discover new ideas and patent new inventions. Can you imagine life without female scientists, inventors, doctors, teachers, and writers?
With all the progress of the last decades, it can be hard to see that there is still work to be done, or to remember what was so difficult before. Modern women may raise a chorus of complaints that there are no confident men left, and blame feminism. A modem man may long for the days when a wife would stay home with a spatula and a sponge, cooking kidney beans and steak for dinner, fascinated by his work stories. However, he would be forgetting the need to make enough money to support his household alone.
Truthfully, most of us are feminists to some degree. A man who believes that women should stick to working as transcribing secretaries or midwives and leave the "good" jobs to men with families is more feminist than a man who believes in strict segregation of the genders or who insists that a woman shouldn't leave the house or speak to strangers. A "trophy wife" who does nothing but apply eye liner and lipstick and go to parties is still feminist enough to believe she shouldn't be hostage to her husband, unable to go to the police if he attacks her for telling him "no" Many of us are feminist indeed; we work in blended groups of men and women, dividing tasks according to ability and interest, read books without caring about the gender of the author, and listen to female teachers as well as male ones with equal attention and respect.
Yet even the most feminist environments have barriers we need to tunnel through. For example, we might criticize successful female solicitors for not devoting enough time to their families, or look down on those women who stay home with children for not being ambitious enough to take up a career. We might look down on men who disobey female bosses for not being team players, or look down on other men who obey the same bosses for acting insufficiently masculine.
These seem like small problems, the lingering ghosts of greater issues, but they're significant when they're happening to you. Culture isn't easy to change; even if you think a woman has every right to speak loudly and swear like pirates, you might have trouble imagining that any man would date her. Or you might have trouble relaxing around a man who is comfortable making less money than his female friends. Clearly, our thirst for equality must never be fully quenched. But feminism cannot become an appendix at the end of a history book, or an artifact of a bygone epoch. We must remain vigilant if we hope for a continuance of the rights of women.

You're sitting at your computer, about to apply for your dream job, but then thoughts start to go through your head that this is a waste of your time.

Maybe you're thinking, "My parents didn't go to college," or "I have a learning disability."

"When I went on their website and I looked at the folks in the most senior level roles, I didn't see anyone who represented my race or my gender."

"There's just no way I'm going to get this job." So you don't even submit the application.

But I'm here to tell you that your self-doubt about your experiences can be the key to driving your career success.

Most of us experience self-doubt at high-stakes moments,

especially if they're people of color, first generation college student, or they don't have a traditional background, so they don't fit "the mold."

If that's you, you're a part of my community.

What I've realized is that these experiences that seem like a liability are actually your differentiating strength.

The secret is to transform how you perceive your own story.

Even if you've been on an untraditional path, you've accrued some skills over time that are really valuable in the workforce.

Your task is to identify those experiences and trumpet them, because it's likely that story, that is your ticket to a great job.

I know this, because I had my own self-doubts that I had to overcome.

I didn't have top-notch internships in college. I also wasn't an extraordinary student.

By the time graduation came around, I was definitely the thank you, laude, versus the cum laude.

What I didn't realize was that I was really good at connecting with people, and now as a talent nerd and a CEO, I've watched thousands of graduates,

who actually had a lot of self-doubts, overcome those and accomplish goals they never thought were imaginable, and here's how.

Ask yourself two questions. The first is, why do you want to do this work?

Maybe you already know the kind of job or work environment that makes you happy, or maybe you haven't quite figured that out yet.

Usually, your personal experiences can help give you clues.

For example, did your grandmother do manual labor, and it made you really worry that she didn't get access to high quality healthcare?

Did your brother have to overcome his dyslexia, and you helped him with his reading?

And so, you became really attuned to education policy.

When you're in an interview, go ahead and talk about them, because it will show your passion and your dedication to the work.

One young person I know, Dylan, was not sharing his personal story about filling out immigration papers for his parents when he was younger.

Often when he told it, people would think that his parents weren't sophisticated.

Dylan realized that he needed to harness the power of that incredible story, along with his academic talents.

He told it in a way, when he was applying to law school, that made it clear why he wanted to go into advocacy law.

He is now in his third year at Georgetown Law.

The second question you have to ask yourself is, how can I share my story to showcase the unique strengths I will bring to the work?

For example, did you have to work multiple jobs while you were in college that did not at all align with your major?

That shows an employer that you have time management skills and a strong work ethic.

Did you need to drop out of college because one of your parents was sick?

Fill in the gap, talk about how you administered their treatment plan.

Talk about how you had to work around their complex schedules.

That shows that you're thoughtful, that you're compassionate, and you know what, that is what makes a great teammate.

Reframing the hardship in your story can remake your confidence over and over again, but it takes time.

It's like running a marathon. You have to train and practice.

Go back and reflect on those tough questions that you need to answer.

The answers are what makes you you, and I have to tell you, when you learn to practice that story, tell it with conviction.

I am sure that the hiring manager is going to hear the strength in it too.

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