Tag: Shirley MacLaine

Secret sauce

I met a pianist last Sunday. When he told me he was 65, I almost flipped. He happened to be a Judo trainer as well. Wow! He looked 45.

Another friend of mine, Jazz musician and software expert, also looks young for his age. What’s the secret sauce? Shirley MacLaine doesn’t look 78.

You might say, oh well, actors and actresses take care of themselves.

How about us? Don’t we want to take care of ourselves?

We are actors of our life scripts. That’s the secret sauce.

Stand in front of the mirror, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

Breathe in , breathe out. Sing out loud, in and out of the showers.

Most New Year resolutions are health-related e.g. losing 10 lbs….

But the goal must be rooted in the subconscious and lived out habitually.

I am sure the pianist had logged in 10,000 hours of Judo practice (he broke many of his bones, just like Jackie Chan).

Still, he wore cross-training shoes, jeans and stretched short sleeves. I am sure he could hang out with his son (who was trying out for the US Olympic Judo team) and be mistaken as “one of the boys”.

Our life expectancy has increased to around 77 years. Like companies , we are “Built to Last”.

Take aways from most admired companies: agility, flexibility and discipline to follow through. Front-line employees are empowered and educated to make judgment calls.  But most importantly, leaders must be able to take a step back and do a pre-morterm analysis (the O ring in Challenger, the release valves in TMI nuclear reactor).

Problems are systemic, built up over time like dental plaque .  Meanwhile, people are creatures of habits i.e. taking the path of least resistance. Voila! Recipe for disaster. Everyone is just doing his or her job logging in 10,000 hours of minimum wages.

I noticed the pianist fingers on the key boards after he had told me who he was (Judo trainer).  I tried to see if he could still manage those graceful spreads. He did play a bit harder than most. Strength and swiftness, controlled yet flexible.

Our time is now. Use the opposite force to our advantage. We have tried to use our own one too many. Try it the other way. Be agile. Be flexible. Be open-minded. It might work. It’s the secret sauce I have seen in musicians and martial-arts experts. When you are multi-talented, it triggered something else, some place else in the brain. Use it.

Memoir yet to be written

The 70’s was coined the ME decade (Tom Wolfe).

I am OK, you’re OK. By now, we should see the ME products on the shelves: from Shirley MacLaine to her brother Warren Beatty, from Rock Hudson to Ron Reagan.

Last of the hardback memoirs. Last of generation ME.

We now join the world, for WE ARE THE WORLD, to the tune of 1 billion faces on Facebook.

An oil refinery went wrong somewhere up North, all of Southern California suffered (last week, gas price hit $5.00 per gallon).

I am an ardent fan of the future. The presence of the future is shown in each child’s eyes. Potential and possibilities.

No politics.

Their experience are mediated through a parental “firewall”. But the rest of reality out there to a child , who is holding an I-pad, is full of promises.

Why, why, why?

Adults can come up with 10 “why nots”, before we can come up with one “why” we should pursue a course of action (change).

Life has dragged us down.

So much that it would be more appropriate for us to wear “handicapped” T-shirts (instead of Superman).

I admire people who show up at the gym. At least, there are a handful of people who know their priorities.

Then, we should be paying attention to legacy.

It’s likely that we will be remembered for one thing, the way Presidents could not live down that one war they presided over.

Will yours be the innovator? The enabler? The leader? The thinker? The Creator? The Peace Maker?

We got that spark of divinity. Just that it got buried deep or blurred along the way.

No one has encouraged us to strive for more, strike for gold, or reach out to the stars.

They want to catch us speeding (they mean the machine, the hidden cameras etc…).

In other words, we live in a society predisposed to punishment instead of rewards.

Yet we pay lip service to employee of the month parking spot (next to handicapped’s).

I have noticed a detrimental trend during the Recession: those who don’t have jobs have gotten used to their second-class citizenry.

And those who hold a job, have also been deflated and resigned to becoming machine-like, which ironically, makes them vulnerable and replaceable by automation.

So, the ME decade in the 70’s gradually dies out (as shown in Memoirs and Biography shelves). In its place, we got the rise of the machine, a mindset (resignation to fate) and even the “end of men” as recently emerged in gender discussions. In twenty years, we expect to see more memoirs by accomplished women executives (HP, IBM, xerox, Facebook, yahoo, Pepsi…) and those who broke the glass ceiling, whether occupational or social (Oprah, Melinda Gates, Merkel, Rice, Hillary). Memoirs yet to be written. Could be yours and mine. With extended life expectancy, you do have time to sort and sift through those raw materials for your memoir. Just make sure to use the word WE  often. So We can share it, re-tweet it, and Like it.

P.S. As of this edit, Lean-In by Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg, has just been released and moved to top spot on USA Today book list, just to prove my point.