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From the beginning, he reaped the benefits of his attractive face:
“What a cute baby!” Although average in intelligence and personality,
from kindergarten on, he was ever in the “in” group. When hormones
kicked in, the benefit grew. Without effort, girls would twirl their
hair, tilt their head, and hold out their budding breasts.
In
interviews for college, his interviewers fell prey to the
well-documented bias toward good-looking people and he was admitted to
surprisingly august institutions—with a bigger discount (colleges prefer
to call it “scholarship”) from the inflated sticker price.
His
unearned interviewing edge extended to job interviews. Before even
graduating from college, he got three offers for well-paying sales
positions—Alas, we are more likely to buy from a Pretty Person. One
offer was in pharma sales. His job would be to convince doctors to
prescribe more of the company’s drugs. Another was to sell enterprise
suites: complicated software the purpose of which is to get more
customers to part from their money. The third offer was to sell medical
devices. Because they require shorter time than do drugs to get FDA
approval and the profit margins are eye-opening, many entrepreneurs
wanting to capitalize on the aging Boomers, develop devices.
He
accepted the medical-device job because it had the highest income
potential, even though he was to sell only to SMBs. (Our ever longer
entitles, emblematic of our ever more complex society, encourages more
abbreviations. In this case, Small to Medium-Sized Businesses distilled
to SMBs.)
Now, he could woo women not just with his pretty face
but with a luxury-affording income. So he received myriad expressions of
romantic interest, subtle and otherwise. For example, there was the
FedEx box from a stranger. When he opened it, a card lay atop the tissue
paper that concealed its contents. It read, “Love Kit.” He pulled back
the tissue and there was a sexy nightgown. Beneath that was an 8x10 of
an alluring woman wearing it. Beneath was her phone number.
Through his 30s, his looks kept aloft his lifestyle of luxury and women despite his otherwise unexceptional self.
But
time waits for no one and as his face aged, his 40s saw a decline in
sales and romantic interest. For example, in earlier years, in walking
down the street, beautiful women who were staring ahead to avoid
unwanted attention, would often bore into his eyes with a melting smile.
Now, the women stay eyes-front He had become invisible.
Having
been able to skate on his luxuriant hair and symmetrical features, he
had made little effort to develop himself. So his personality and sales
skills remained in arrested development. Consistent with a person who
had always tried to buy his way into happiness, he deliberated between a
facelift and investing in psychotherapy and an MBA in marketing. Natch,
he chose the facelift.
It was his second year of teaching kindergarten, his first in a new
school. He remembered last year’s first day: Twenty 5-year-olds, most
bounding, a few slinking. "So much energy, so many needs. They didn’t
train me for this in ed school.”
But it worked out well enough that he was looking forward to his second year, even though it was in a grittier school.
It
was Sep 3, 1985, two days before the first day of school. He walked
into the classroom where he’d be teaching kindergarten. And there was an
orchard of Apple 2e computers. He wouldn’t have expected that his first
encounter with The Computer would be in a kindergarten but that was
fortunate. A bit technophobic, it was reassuring to think, “If
kindergartners can use it, maybe I can.” On one desk, he spotted a
software box :“Bank Street Writer.” The blurb explained that it was a
children’s “word-processing program” that enables users to erase,
insert, and move text far more easily than on a typewriter—No white-out,
no need to retype pages.
By nature, motivated by speed, such
time-saving drove him to sit at the computer instead of, for example,
hanging posters about animals, colors, and the alphabet. Following the
software’s instruction booklet, he put the floppy disk into the drive
whereupon the screen made clear where you type and how you erase,
insert, cut, and paste. That evening, he bought an Apple 2e and a copy
of Bank Street Writer, and thus his addiction to writing began.
Confidently,
perhaps hubristically, he thought, “If word processing makes writing
this easy, why don’t I go all the way and use it to write a book?" And
indeed, his first book, “What I Learned From My Kindergartners” was
written on that children’s word processor and sold for a $5,000 advance
to a family-run publisher.
Over the next 20 years, he made enough
from his articles and two books to legitimately call his writing a
sideline. At that point, with 20 years in as a public school teacher, he
was eligible to take early retirement with one of those generous
pensions that school teachers are among the few to still get. “Thank you
union. Thank you taxpayer.”
While he’d get additional money for
additional years, the golden handcuffs now felt looser, indeed
escapable. He felt he still did a decent job of teaching but wasn’t
quite as patient nor as inspired to create compelling lessons that met
the needs of his classes' ever wider range of students. “Should I quit
and become a full-time writer? A fresher teacher might do a better job. I
tried changing grades but that didn’t really solve. I might feel more
satisfied if I were writing full time instead of blowing 20 kids’ noses
and teaching diphthongs, digraphs, and pre-geometry. But there’s a
reason the words ‘starving' and 'writer’ so often adjoin. And very few
writers get full benefits and a pension.”
In the end, the slogan,
“Do what you love and the money will follow” prevailed. Alas, his timing
was terrible. Although his writing productivity and reputation grew,
his income from writing was flat and eventually flatlined. The rise of
citizen journalists, pirated book downloads, and declining newspaper ad
revenues thanks to Craigslist’s free ads—slowly morphed his writing
sideline into a writing hobby. The final nail was when the Huffington
Post gave him an ultimatum, “The world has changed. A million people
would kill to write for us. The pay is zero. Take it or leave it.” So
that sanctimonious publication, frequently railing against capitalism,
was using one of capitalism’s darker aspects to save a pittance so
Arianna Huffington could get even richer.
He continued writing
even though it was without pay. That was because he could now write what
he wanted and if a publisher didn’t want his work, he’d post the
articles on his blog and self-publish books on Amazon. That freedom
spawned contrarian work unpublishable in today’s censorious publishing
world.
But after two years of seeing his savings decline and, at
age 50, envisioning needing to support himself for another 30+ years, he
took the additional courses now required to reinstate his teaching
license. And on September 5, 2017, he opened the door to Room 112 at
Jefferson Elementary School and sat at his desk contemplating the next
20 years of 20 five-year-olds, bright-eyed with anticipation of school’s
wonders.
Most of us want to live a life in which we make a difference. To that
end, it helps to have a guiding principle, something we keep in mind as
we make major life decisions. One worthy principle is utilitarianism.I explore it in my PsychologyToday.com article today.
Too many bright, motivated people don’t live up to their potential. Sometimes, a mental health
professional may be required, but other times, just a caring mentor may
do, for example, if the person could use better social skills, advising
on school, coaching on time management, or simply feels lonely, different from most people.
We typically think of mentoring as older guiding younger but even
seniors can benefit from mentoring. But the example I’ll use in my PsychologyToday.com article today on mentoring is a widely under-served group: children with excellent
reasoning ability who attend a school with primarily lower-middle-class
children. In such schools, programs for high-potential children often
have been eviscerated yet the parents
are often insufficiently wealthy or knowledgeable to help their kids
live up to their potential. Thus, mentoring such students may yield
particular benefit.
HERE is the link to the article.
Many people volunteer, whether as a launchpad to paying work or simply
to contribute to a non-profit cause. But what volunteer efforts are
likely to make a real difference and where you’re not just one of
zillions clamoring to volunteer, for example, for the environment, fight
poverty, or dump Trump? And what are the best tactics for converting a volunteer gig into a paying job? I address all that in my PsychologyToday.com article today.
Year-end is a good time to inventory your life. So, my PsychologyToday.com article today asks you to look at seven
aspects of lifeto see if there's something you'd like to change.
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