Month: November 2012

Cracked

The Book of the Week is “Cracked” by Dr. Drew Pinsky with Todd Gold, published in 2004.

The author of this ebook, a doctor, recounts his experiences treating drug addicts in a rehabilitation facility. Many of his patients were subjected to various kinds of childhood abuse that “…caused them to feel helpless, powerless, and in grave danger.” They became distrustful, and had difficulty making social connections and processing emotions. Many had parents who were addicts.

Some people are genetically predisposed to becoming addicts. One fifth of people entering rehab are addicted to marijuana, and usually, alcoholism runs in their families. People may develop lesions on the brain after just a couple of exposures to the drug ecstasy. Many people turn to shoplifting as a substitute thrill to opiate abuse in trying to quit their addiction.

At the start of addiction, the nucleus accumbens in the brain changes so that the body thinks that controlled substances such as heroin, alcohol, cocaine, etc., are necessary for survival. Beating an addiction requires rewiring some of the noncognitive parts of the brain.

Sadly, American society pressures its citizens to derive emotional comfort from material possessions, an unhealthy practice. “We forget that people feel best when they’re interacting, talking, helping, and creating with other people… face to face, particularly in times of adversity or when they’re feeling threatened.”

Read the book to learn the stories of typical addicts, the detrimental behaviors of their loved ones, and of the author’s frustrations with his patients’ stingy insurance companies.

Happiness From the Inside Out – Bonus Post

Today is Thanksgiving Day for Americans, many of whom use the excuse of a celebration based on a traditional story of questionable veracity to:

take a break from work

overindulge in certain foods

watch aggressive men play a game called “football” (though the foot is seldom used) and

show fleeting gratitude for their material possessions.

This holiday is a sad commentary on the lack of happiness in the United States.

Along these lines, this blogger would like to list a few interesting, general factoids from the book, “Happiness From the Inside Out” by Robert Mack, published in 2009.

“The second reason people try to buy happiness with success is that they actually mistake success for happiness. They think success and happiness are the same thing, or least should be the same thing.  But happiness is more than success.”

A woman’s, but not a man’s happiness level rises with the birth of a child.

Both parents experience lower happiness levels with the birth of children after the first one.

Parents feel least happy through the kids’ teenage years, and their mood improves significantly only when the kids move out.

In a widely publicized, competitive environment like the Olympics, second-place finishers tend to be harder on themselves than third-place finishers. The silver medal winners compare themselves to the gold medal winners, so they feel more anguish at losing than the bronze medal winners, who compare themselves to all other competitors.

The third-tier athletes are happier– more grateful for what they have; they put things in perspective. Enough said.

Maybe You Never Cry Again

The Book of the Week is “Maybe You Never Cry Again” by Bernie Mac with Pablo F. Fenjves, published in 2003. This is the autobiography of a man who heeded his mother’s wisdom in achieving his life’s dream of becoming a famous comedian.

Foremost, Mac’s mother taught him to be self-reliant. One of her sayings was, “If you want a helping hand, look at the end of your arm.”

Mac listed the four kinds of standup comedians:  mediocre joke tellers, political commentators, observers of human nature, and tellers of personal stories. He exemplified the fourth kind, making audiences of mostly his own ethnicity laugh by comparing his African American experience to that of Caucasians without mincing words. “The most personal is the most universal.”

For example, he told the reader that, as an adult, he became as excited as a kid in a candy store when he flew in a plane for the first time. He said, “White people wouldn’t understand that feeling. White people get on planes all the time. They born on planes. Same thing with photographs. White people, they got pictures of themselves every minute of their lives. Here’s little Libby…Black people, they lucky to have one or two pictures of themselves.”

Read how Mac put his mother’s teachings to use to get through the trials and tribulations he suffered on the way to stardom.

A First-Rate Madness

The Book of the Week is “A First-Rate Madness, Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness” by Nassir Ghaemi, published in 2011. This book describes the leadership abilities of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, various Civil War generals, Adolf Hitler, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Ted Turner, as determined by their mental health, or lack thereof.

The author argues that most people who have mental illness are not insane all the time; they merely have abnormal moods, such as depression or mania some of the time. He claims that mentally ill political and military leaders are heroic in times of crisis, and mediocre during peaceful, uneventful times; the opposite is true for mentally healthy leaders. This concept can be applied to the corporate world, too.

“In a strong economy, the ideal business leader is the corporate type… He may not be particularly creative… all is well only when all that matters is administration… When the economy is in crisis… the corporate executive takes a backseat to the entrepreneur…” It is rare to find someone who is an excellent leader under both extreme and normal conditions.

Ghaemi contends that “…depression led to more, not less realistic assessments of control over one’s environment, an effect that was only enhanced by a real-world emotional desire…” In other words, people prone to clinical depression have a more acute sense of reality than those who are not, a concept called “depressive realism.”

When the mentally healthy leader faces a crisis, he handles it poorly, because having suffered little in his youth, he “…hasn’t had a chance to develop resilience that might see him through later hardships” and has not developed the ability to empathize. George W. Bush was one such leader. To boot, he had “hubris syndrome.” Getting drunk on power, like many mentally healthy leaders, made him “…unwilling and even unable to accept criticism or correctly interpret events that diverge from their own beliefs. Hubris syndrome worsens with duration and absoluteness of one’s rule.”

Read the book to understand the psychology behind the successes and failures of the aforementioned leaders.

Dot Bomb

The Book of the Week is “Dot Bomb” by J. David Kuo, published in 2001. This ebook details the business dealings and the ensuing suspenseful power struggle at a dot-com company called Value America between 1996 and 2001.

The online retailer’s intended brand image was to boast maximum selection of merchandise shipped directly from sellers. This delivery-on-demand arrangement allowed the company to remain inventory-free, and thus minimize overhead costs. However, in reality, it needed to use resellers for many of the supposedly infinite products it sold.

Value America’s founder and leader, Craig Winn, was a charming megalomaniac who had grand plans to partner with various major corporations in order to attract investors and make the company worthy of an IPO. Unfortunately, Winn had planned to sell stock to the public just after the peak of the dot-com boom, when brokerages’ confidence in internet companies had started to wane.

After Value America went public, Goldman Sachs issued a report that Amazon.com was the internet retailer with the highest potential for success because it had high sales margins on its then-merchandise consisting only of books; a $30 billion valuation was not out of the realm of possiblity. Goldman went on to say Value America had the worst prospects, with sales margins of 1% and runaway costs. It would have to achieve revenues of billions of dollars in order to make any money.

Toward the end of the story, the author realized “Despite the hype, headlines, and hysteria, this was just a gold rush we were in… a lot of us were kin to those poor, freezing fools in Alaska who had staked everything on turning up a glittering chunk of gold.”

Read the book to learn the fate of the author, his family and the other Value America employees with dollar signs in their eyeballs.