Last week, Chris Penn blogged his 11 Little Secrets to staying happy, healthy, productive and sane.  Fellow bloggers followed suit, turning the idea into a mini-meme.

So I’ll bite.

Justin Kownacki’s 11 Little Secrets to Being Moderately Successful

1.  Don’t Use Your Job as an Excuse for Not Having a Life. Ideally, you enjoy your job.  Optimistically, you love it.  And realistically, you can stomach it for 40 hours a week in order to pay the bills and keep a roof over your head.  The rest of your time is your time.  Live it.

Everyone can live a life that’s filled with amazing moments.  Not all of that will happen at the office.  Don’t feel guilty for not living there.

2.  Create Something You’re Responsible for Sustaining. Maybe it’s a business.  Maybe it’s a work of art.  Maybe it’s a child.

When you’re emotionally invested in something, you’re living a life that no one else has lived.  That’s your story.

When something (or someone) relies on you for its very existence, that gives you a clearer perspective.  Your choices now have consequences.  You can be a hero every day.  Embrace that, because it’s a responsibility not everyone has the opportunity (or the stomach) to enjoy.

3.  Pretend Your Kids Are Watching. Imagine the idealized version of you, the way your kids think of you when they’re too young to realize that you’re just another flawed human being.

Now make the same choices that the idealized version of you would make.  Isn’t it wonderful be to able to look up to yourself?

4.  Observe People. If you only ever live inside your own head, you’re missing the big picture.

Everybody you meet is a litmus test for your own beliefs.  Are your presumptions correct, or are people more complex than you give them credit for?

As a freelancer, I choose to work from cafes every day because a) I like coffee, and b) I like watching people.  I like hearing and seeing the ways they interact.  I learn from the choices they make, and from the way they phrase their questions and answers.

And what I learn from observing others helps me better understand myself.

5.  Surround Yourself with People Who Challenge Your Presumptions. The world is the way we make it, so reminding yourself that people have differing worldviews is helpful when you’re trying to understand why the world doesn’t always work the way you’d like it to.  It can also help you think differently about your own beliefs, and lead you to separate the grey areas from the black and white.

Plus, how you’d solve a problem is not always how I’d solve a problem.  If you know how others would act in your place, your artillery of possible responses to any situation increases exponentially.

6.  Be Comfortable Alone. Ultimately, we live our lives alone.  If we’re lucky, we spend those lives affecting and being affected by others, but that’s entirely external.  The bulk of your life is lived alone, in your own head.

Be comfortable there, because there’s no getting out.

7.  Draw a Line Between Quirks and Flaws. Our irregularities come in two flavors: the quirks that make us individuals, and the flaws that prevent us from succeeding.  Don’t waste time perfecting your quirks when your flaws are what’s actually holding you back.

Your high-pitched laugh or your tragic fashion choices are quirks; others may find them annoying or endearing, but they’re incidental to who you are as a person.  Your chainsmoking, your grudge-holding and your refusal to show up on time are flaws; if they don’t kill you directly, they’ll certainly degrade your quality of life.

Remember the idealized you?  The idealized you doesn’t have those flaws.  Work on that.

8.  Be Specific with Your Language. Words mean something.  Don’t take them for granted.

Like him or loathe him, Christopher Hitchens is one of the most specific writers I’ve ever read.  The words he chooses to express himself mean exactly what he intends for them to mean, which leaves very little room for ambiguities or misinterpretation of his ideas.

Relying on tired metaphors and figures of speech is lazy, and it muddies our ability to understand one another.  When you’re writing or speaking, be conscious of every word you select.  It’s better to use your 1000 word vocabulary well than to sleepwalk through a minefield of ambiguities.

9.  Walk Where You Can, While You Can. America is a car-based culture, which leads us to consider most locations as widespread vistas.  But that’s just one sweeping point of view.

Walking through a neighborhood gives you the time to see the bricks and pavement that comprise the daily lives of the people who live there.  It prompts you to consider the ways our lives are connected, and to marvel at the ways our lives have evolved from the times when walking was the only way we could have gotten from place to place.

It’s also good exercise, great “thinking time” and better for the environment than driving.

10.  Take Naps. Few things in life are more pleasurable than pressing the pause button on your obligations and recharging.  Don’t let a puritanical work ethic rob you of the freedom to disconnect on your own terms.

11.  Have Extremely Few Inviolable Principles. Life is a grey area.  People, situations and opportunities are constantly evolving.  What’s “right” for one person may not be “right” for you, and it all may be “wrong” tomorrow.

The fewer filters we invent to ignore other people and discount their opinions — or to judge them into categories, instead of as fellow complex humans — the richer our lives and the greater our potential will be.

Plus, the less you believe in, the less often you’ll consider yourself a hypocrite.  And then the idealized version of you will have a lot less explaining to do.

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Tiger Woods cheated on his wife.

We, the morally upstanding public, are supposed to hate him.

Michael Vick murdered dogs.

We, the morally outraged public, are supposed to hate him.

Bernie Madoff made a fortune scamming people.

We, the innocent victims, are supposed to hate him.

But Tiger Woods is also a dad.  Do we hate him for that, too?

If we hate Mark Sanford for cheating on his wife, do we also hate the way he governed?

If we hate Roman Polanski for his sexual transgressions, must we also hate his films?

We’re a public that celebrates the athletic feats of people we’ll never meet…

… unless those people play for a team we hate.

We love our artists and entertainers when they delight us…

… but we hate them when they make mistakes.

Is Tiger Woods “a golfer”?

Is Tiger Woods “a womanizer”?

Is Tiger Woods a human?

What are you?

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If you’re good at what you do, (some) people will like it.

If you’re really good at what you do, (some) people will hate it.

This is good.  It means you’re conveying ideas in a visceral way that makes people react.

But if your end goal is to be loved by everyone, it’ll never happen.  And this means you’re in for a life of misery.

Don’t believe me?  Take it from Shakespeare.

“A Nashville Audience Is Not a Toronto Audience.”

A few months ago, Nashville was drubbed by art lovers for requesting that Toronto’s Classical Theatre Project “tone down” the sexuality in their performance of Romeo & Juliet so as to not offend the sensibilities of a Nashville audience.

Ultimately, the performers rejected the request, which left some parents quite displeased.

[A] woman who identified herself as Val, a home-school teacher from Hermitage, “struggled being here with my son. The sexuality was too much. Our children need to be more pure.”

As expected, the comments from the newspaper report of the incident ranged from blind support of the actors to enraged support of the parents, including denouncements of Shakespeare himself as being “too lewd” for any tasteful audience.

So, if we can all agree that even Shakespeare can’t please everyone, the question you need to ask yourself is:

What kind of audience are you trying to please?

Approach #1: “I’m in It for the Money”

If you do what you do because you want to get paid, then you probably want to get paid by as many people as possible.

Suggestion?  Offend as few people as possible.

The less objectionable you are, the easier you are to hire.  The fewer excuses your boss has to make for your behavior, the longer you’ll remain employed.

Safe?  Yes.  Interesting?  No.  Fulfilling?  That depends.  Would you rather be admired or pay your rent?

Approach #2: “I’m in It for the Experience”

If you’re not worried about starving to death, you can afford to take chances.

You can afford to piss people off.  You can afford to define yourself, rather than allowing yourself to be defined by others.

Suggestion?  Be extreme.

Anybody can push the envelope, because it’s easy to push the envelope right back.

So set that envelope on fire.

Sure, you might get burned, but flames attract an audience.  And you’ll immediately know who’s on your side.

Once you know who your friends are, you can decide whether or not you want to bridge the troll gap and form a consensus, or if you’d rather keep forging ahead on your very own path.  One can be lucrative, the other can be memorable, but if you go big, you’ll never go home alone.

Approach #3: “I’m in It for Myself.”

This is the hardest path to advise because, really, you’re entirely on your own.

Nothing anybody else says at this point will convince you that you’re wrong, and no amount of ass-kissing will make you feel any more right.  When you reach this point, it’s all you.

And by then you won’t care if you’re surrounded by trolls because nothing they can say or do would distract you from pursuing your own goal, whatever that goal might be.

(NOTE: It bears noting that “trolls” and “cops” are not the same thing.  If your personal path leads you to be surrounded by the cops, you may have pushed that envelope farther than anybody else appreciates.  Sanity is a treasure; guard yours.)

A Word About Being Needed vs. Being Needy

Audiences are tricky things.  Without them, you’re no one (other than who you already were yesterday).  But with them, you may become someone unrecognizable.

You want to be wanted, but you hate being reliant on someone else.

You want to be loved, but you never want to get hurt.

But having an audience is not a one-way street.  (Even Julia Allison knows that.)

If what you do becomes popular or profitable, you’ll want it to remain so.

Thus, if you become needed by others, you’ll become needy by association.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does limit your ability to experiment.  It does mean your choices will be judged.  And it does mean you may someday have to make a choice about what you really believe, and who you really are.

Are you Toronto or Nashville?

When the time comes, you’ll know.

In the meantime, enjoy the ride.  And when in doubt, remember: trolls like fire.

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Lately, I’ve been arguing against the perpetual “us vs. them” method of storytelling because I think it’s ruining our ability (and desire) to understand each other.  Opposing groups have always been quick to condemn “the other,” but the degree to (and zest with) which we do it these days borders on alarming.

A few days ago, Michael Hasko tweeted something that sums up our increasingly polarized world:

Apparently any sort of dissenting comment on a message board is trolling. -sigh-

And he’s right.  While you might think “social” media should involve an exchange of mutually-respected POVs, that’s rarely the case.  Instead, like-minded tribes flock together and hurl stones at one another with such zeal that anyone offering even a mildly disagreeable opinion is immediately branded as The Enemy.  With “discourse” like this, is it any wonder we all cling so desperately to our own fishbowls and echo chambers?

Since when did we become so convinced of our own infallibility that we’re now completely unwilling to consider the opinions of others?  Shouldn’t global access to information make us more skeptical of absolutes, and therefore more accommodating of our individual differences?  Or maybe it’s just the opposite: when we’re presented with so many opposing viewpoints, perhaps we cling to our own ever more fiercely because admitting we might be wrong would undermine one of the only “truisms” we don’t feel compelled to question on a daily basis.

Whatever the reason for our social decay, things have gotten out of hand.  From the Senate to the cubicles, we’ve lost our willingness to listen to, learn from and discuss any assertions other than our own.  And as this erosion of civility continues across all walks of life, we run the risk of handing future generations tracts of dogma instead of the ability to reason.

But it doesn’t have to go on like this.  We just need to take incremental steps away from our own intellectual isolation.  As such, here are 11 ways you can stop perpetuating the cycle of exclusion.

1. Stop preaching to the choir.

Everyone loves being told how smart they are — or, more importantly, how right they are.  The assurance of being correct is a drug like no other.  And the “connectivity” of the Internet provides you with an endless supply of listeners who’ll fall all over themselves to agree with you, no matter what you believe.

Avoid that.

If you really believe something, try selling it to someone who thinks you’re wrong.  If you’ve ever tried pitching social media to a hostile boardroom, debated the existence of God with an atheist or argued with a child who refused to buy into your set of rules, you quickly realized that “just because” is never the right answer.  Defending your beliefs helps remind you why you do believe them in the first place — and, occasionally, it reveals the gaps in your own logic that might lead you to question your own certainty.

2. Stop letting yourself be preached to.

If you only consume streams of information that reinforce your own presumptions, two things happen: you’ll never learn anything you didn’t already suspect was true, and you’ll never be surprised.  The people who sell you the information you’re imbibing already know that you’re naturally opposed to philosophical conflict, so they have no reason to rock your mental boat.  And the more candy they feed you, the less likely you are to stray.

You wouldn’t consent to eat the same three meals every day for the rest of your life, so why sign up for the informational equivalent?  Start sampling.

3. I agree with you, but…

A good friend of mine once noticed that I always got extremely aggravated whenever I’d argue with a certain ideologically opposed family friend.  His point of view made as little sense to me as mine did to him, and each of us refused to concede any points because we were both dead sure we were correct on all counts.

After hearing us debate our polarized philosophies on several occasions, my friend suggested I employ the concession above.  By doing so, he explained that two things would happen:

• I’d establish a common ground, thereby dissolving the brutal tone of the debate, and
• I’d clarify the specifics of what we were actually disagreeing about, rather than allowing the discussion to roam unbounded.

So I tried it.  And it worked.  And no, even today that family friend and I still don’t see eye to eye on the vast majority of the world’s problems.  But we can also drink a beer and talk about football without every conversation dissolving into an indictment of our belief systems.  Sometimes a truce is a two-sided victory.

4. Ignore national politics.

As someone who’s spent the past decade getting irate over American politics, only to look back and realize I could have been doing something useful with all that energy, I say this with all sincerity: we care way too much about what Washington is doing.

Thanks to our jingoistic American news cycle, people are more aware of what the President is doing on a daily basis than what their neighbors across the street or around the globe are ever doing.  Our priorities and sense of scope are broken, with our own government being portrayed as having a disproportionately large impact on our daily lives and well-being, compared with the larger and smaller influences that actually mean more to us in the long and short term.

Yes, we elected them.  And yes, they’re going to rape and pillage us as their way of saying thank you.  But obsessing over lofty claims, party rhetoric and things that may or may not happen only distracts us from the real news that we could have an impact on, if we only knew it was happening.

5. Focus on what matters directly.

You have bills to pay.  You have mouths to feed.  You have love to find, and some to give.  You have goals, hobbies, passions and concerns.  And you have a nagging sense that things could be better in your life, “if only I could ___.”

So does everyone else.  Get those basics squared away and you’ll have time to spend on filling in that blank, rather than alleviating your frustrations by obstructing someone else’s attempts to do the same.

6. Focus on what matters globally.

Every time I watch the TV news from another country, I find myself quietly astounded that there is another country besides America.  In the US, we only talk about world news when there’s a war, a disaster or a missing blond girl in a hard-to-spell place.  But if you venture beyond our borders, you’ll find there’s a swath of other people with other cultures, values, beliefs and problems that need to be solved.

You don’t need to solve them yourself, although that is a pretty American thing to want to do.  But just being aware of those problems so you can not contribute toward making them worse would certainly be a good start toward making things better.

And, as a bonus, you might not be so afraid of people with different skin colors, wardrobes or last names.

7. Take direct action in your locality.

Hating either national political party doesn’t get you very far.  Neither does making sweeping generalizations about systemic national problems like failing education, absent health care, abused ecology or a corrupt economy, and ending with a proclamation that these problems are “too big to change,” or that “someone should do something about it,” is just an excuse to keep whinging.

Surprise: you’re someone.  And no, you can’t wake up tomorrow and fix nationwide problems with a wink and a smile.  But you can probably make a difference in your neighborhood.  You can probably call your city council representative and ask for help.  And you can probably conduct yourself the way you wish your elected officials and other people of influence would, and lead others by your example.

It’s not as folksy as bitching about Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow over wing night with your buds.  But it might make everyone’s life a bit more palatable.

8. Hold people accountable.

When your friend, lover, coworker or boss doesn’t do something he said he would, point it out.  Don’t be a dick about it, but don’t let it go uncorrected either.  Because the more lax you are in your accounting of others, the more lax everyone — including you — allows themselves to become.  We’re only ever good people when there’s a reward for it, or when there’s a penalty for being bad.  Don’t wait for someone else to enforce acceptable standards; that’s how mediocrity takes control in a lazy culture.

Oh, and when it comes to politics, forget party affiliations: if your elected official didn’t do what he said he’d do, or if she did things you find reprehensible, vote ‘em out.  Fear that “the other party would only be worse” is irrational; focus less on how bad it could get and focus more on holding your representatives accountable for doing the job you paid them to do with your tax dollars.

9. Be unafraid of change.

As mentioned above, fear of change is irrational.  We’re always petrified of “how bad it could get,” but we forget two things:

• Whatever “it” is, it’s probably already pretty bad now, and
• No matter how bad “it” gets, we’ll live through it.

Look at the vast amounts of shit people have lived through for centuries.  For every enlightenment, there’s a dark age.  For every scientific advance, there’s a worldwide cataclysm.  Your parents always had it better and had it worse, depending on the topic of conversation.  And the past always looks more romantic than the future, because the past is something we’ve proven we could get through while the future just might involve that one insurmountable challenge we just can’t overcome.

Don’t bet on it.  We’ve come this far without destroying the planet, so one more bad piece of legislation or ill-timed hurricane won’t do us in either.  Worry less about the unknown obstacles and fear more the possibility that if we don’t move toward change, this might be as good as it gets.

10. Refuse stereotypes.

The problem with stereotypes is that they’re usually accurate.  Clichés don’t happen based on once-in-a-lifetime irregularities; they happen because the same kinds of people repeatedly do the same kinds of things, and those things tend to be irredeemably stupid.

But instead of seeing those aggravations as uncorrectable offenses, ask the larger question: why does this happen? What cultural, sociological, geographic or political influences cause certain people to act in certain ways, or to believe certain things?  How do those habits get started, and why do they perpetuate despite their impractical disadvantages?  Are they even considered disadvantages by the people who do them?

Once you understand that everything has a root cause (or multiple causes), you can understand our differences rather than writing them off as cultural deficiencies.  And that brings us one degree closer to not hating each other.

11. Question certainties.

If you do nothing else, doubt everything.  Doubt what you’ve always believed.  Doubt what everyone else believes, too.  Refuse to say with certainty that any one thing is irrevocably true.  See the world as a massive grey area, rather than pillars of black and white.

The world is full of conflicts and riddles, and we have the capacity to quell some of them and solve others.  And yes, by doing so, we just might create more problems in the process.  Such is life.  But whatever worldviews we form, and whatever actions we take, we should be making our decisions based on data, not ideologies.

And if that means you spend a little less time watching TV news, a little more time talking to those neighbors you’ve never actually introduced yourself to, and a lot less time posting anonymous hate screed to your social network of choice, then maybe 2011 won’t seem like the festering shithole 2010 seems poised to become.

And that’s a start.

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Whether employers are hiring employees, clients are choosing contractors or potential mates are sizing each other up for compatibility, everything boils down to confidence.

Employers want to know that they can trust the person they’re paying to get the job done.  Ditto for clients, who need to know they’re in good hands before they relinquish their future to someone they can’t control.

And regardless of your preference for certain body types and personality quirks, nothing gets one person’s pheromones crackling like sensing another person’s confidence.

I’m not talking about hubris, ego, showing off, commanding attention, “owning the room” or any other displays of wannabe alpha-domination meant to convince other people that you’re The Man.  (Or, depending on your chromosomes, The Woman.)

I’m talking about the two actual kinds of confidence.

There’s the confidence that comes from knowing what you’re talking about, and there’s the confidence that comes from being able to admit you have no idea what you’re talking about.  In theory, it’s important to be able to tell these two types apart, so employers, clients and mates don’t get hoodwinked by fast-talking charlatans.

But it isn’t.

Do You Know What I Know?

If you don’t know what you’re talking about but you’re trying to convince someone you do, you’re not going to appear confident in the first place.  You’re going to appear bombastic.  You’ll be overly jovial or subtly hostile.  You’ll act and speak in ways that obscure your lack of knowledge, and betray your own lack of faith in your ability to get the job done.

If you don’t know what you’re talking about but you do know how to learn, you’ll be confident in your ability to deliver an end result that will please your client even if you’re entering uncharted waters.  Because confidence doesn’t come from knowing the waters; it comes from knowing where to find a boat and a map.

You may not be an expert in a field, but you’re an expert at becoming an expert in a field.  Your confidence stems not from your ability to execute, but your ability to adapt and apply previous experience to new obstacles.

Either way, the client wins.  And the client knows it.  Which is why the client doesn’t need to know if you know what you’re talking about.

They just need to know if you can row.

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Photo by estherase, via Flickr.

Last week, I urged us all to reconsider the way in which we tell stories.  I believe oversimplification and a reliance on “us vs. the other” is destroying our ability to understand and relate to one another, which obstructs our chances of evolving culturally.  And since what we choose to care about is entirely subjective, that means the stories we tell ourselves are incredibly important in shaping our values.

Now Jack Rice asks a loaded question that highlights the life-or-death consequences of the way we tell stories:

Would We Use This Photo If These People Were White?

My answer:  Yes.  Devastation isn’t about color, it’s about scope.

Natural disasters create destruction on a massive scale, and while everything in life can be politicized, the disintegration of an entire nation can only be understood visually.  If we all heard that thousands of Hatians were dead and rotting in the streets, but all we saw were photos of weeping individuals, there’d be a cognitive dissonance: we need proof of such histrionic claims, and that proof must come in bulk to be believed.

Grotesquely, we also need a reason to pay attention.  The global stage is increasingly filled with tragedies, and since Haiti might feel a little too “Katrina-y” for some viewers, it needs a way to distinguish itself not only from other current headlines but also from the memory of other recently-digested miseries.

And Now the Part No One Wants to Talk About

Apart from its literal documentary value, this photo — like all photos of post-earthquake Haiti — serves a larger humanitarian purpose: it’s meant to elicit an emotional reaction in its viewers, and spur them to take action to help alleviate the tragedy.  Since aid is fueled by money, people need to be moved to donate in mass volume.  The more vast and unspeakable the horror, the more likely that even people who have political reasons to justify or ignore the tragedy will be moved to take action.

If we understood stories differently — if we processed information according to a universal understanding of importance, rather than straining it through degrees of “us vs. them” — maybe we’d only need one image of a dead Hatian to make the world care.

But I doubt it.

Whenever there’s a national or global tragedy, I’m interested in seeing how the world reacts.  But I’m even more fascinated by the ways people don’t react — and why they choose to do so.

For every Iran or Haiti that tops Twitter’s trending topics, there are a million #whyyouinchurch or #PantsOnTheGround just waiting in the wings, providing distraction and empowerment for the people who can’t be bothered to care about life’s larger landscape.  This dividing line between caring and ignorance used to bother me, until I realized that what we choose to care about is entirely subjective — even when it comes to epic disaster.

One Person’s Fiery Death Is Another Person’s Reminder to Mute Her Blackberry

A few years ago, I was in a Pittsburgh restaurant (an Eat ‘n Park, unsurprisingly), overhearing the conversations happening around me.  A college student and her mother were eating at a table nearby, and somehow the conversation turned to September 11.

“I remember you called me that morning,” the daughter said,” and I let the machine get it, and you were all like, ‘Turn on your TV, a  plane just hit the World Trade Center and  people are jumping out the windows!’  And I just turned the machine off and went back to bed, because I’m thinking, ‘Why are you telling me this?  I don’t even live in New York City!’”  (laughs)

Choosing to Care (And Why We Do… Or Don’t)

The truth is, everything you do is a value judgment.  Which headlines you read, whom you invest your time in, which obligations you allow yourself to believe you’re beholden to.  None of these interests or beliefs are pre-coded in your DNA.  They’re the product of your personality + environment + culture + immediate reality.  And all of those aspects combine to form the value system through which you process all incoming information, deciding what matters to you and what doesn’t.

The truth is, we’re all wild animals.  We only adhere to social norms as a way of streamlining the feeding and mating processes, and because living in a mutually-beneficial society has its benefits when compared to a life of anarchy.  But if the pros of being a part of a society ever cease to outweigh the cons, the only thing stopping us from checking out is the law.  (Jailers and hangmen are always the last line of defense against people who decide they’d rather not play along with our constructed normality.)

The truth is, you don’t need to care about your family, or about the next iPhone, or about Haiti.  Doing so doesn’t make you a better person; it just makes you feel better about being a person.  It also makes you more civil, which your fellow humans appreciate because it gives them a positive example to follow while simultaneously alerting them that you’re “normal” enough for them to not have to worry about (or defend against).

Caring also provides your life with something it would otherwise be missing: context.

I Am What I Laugh (or Cry) About

Maybe caring about a cause gives you something to feel good (or bad) about, and this helps you frame your choices.

Maybe championing a cause leads you to believe you have an externally-imposed purpose.

Or maybe you just enjoy feeling like the only person who cares about something no one else cares about, which reinforces your outsider status by way of empathizing with your fellow underdogs.

The people and ideals we choose to invest our time and emotions in are what defines us, both to ourselves and to the people who observe us.  Our causes are signals to others, and so is the degree of effort we ascribe to them — whether we profess to believe something in passing or whether we’re willing to stand up and take action when the need to defend our beliefs arises.

Whatever you choose to care about, or whether you choose to care about nothing at all, remember one thing: nobody can make you care.  Except you.  And that makes caring the only true freedom we have.

Whenever friends from Pittsburgh ask me how I’m adapting to Baltimore, I tell them the truth: Baltimore and Pittsburgh are so similar on so many levels that “adapting” hasn’t been necessary.  It’s more like I’ve just moved to an extremely remote Pittsburgh neighborhood, and now it takes me 4 hours to get to the nearest Crazy Mocha instead of 15 minutes.  (Also, people wear a lot more purple here.)

But there are significant differences between the cities, and it’s those “little things” that add up to one big problem: Baltimore has a negative self-image that impacts the way I, a new resident, choose to invest myself (or, more specifically, not invest myself) in my new home.

What Your Labrador Retriever Has to Do with the City’s Murder Rate

The most obvious difference between Pittsburgh and Baltimore is the latter’s epic homicide rate.  In 2009, Pittsburgh had 38 homicides (as of December 21), down from 73 in 2008.  In the same year, Baltimore had 239, up from 234 in 2008.  That’s 6 times as many murders in a city that’s barely double the size of Pittsburgh.

So what makes people kill other people?  And why are Baltimoreans so much more likely — or more willing, or more accepting of other people’s homicidal inclinations — to kill each other?

According to at least one analyst, it all boils down to Baltimore’s lack of a shared citywide identity.

The current issue of Baltimore’s Urbanite magazine includes an excerpt from Ohio State history professor Randolph Roth‘s American Homicide, which suggests that murder rates escalate when citizens lose faith in their social and political hierarchies.   If we no longer feel like the system we live in is fair, we don’t believe that respecting even the most basic rules will in any way improve our quality of life, so we’re more inclined to institute our own “survival of the fittest” mentality, pursuing what we believe is achievable rather than striving to “succeed” in a corrupt system.

All of which means that solving Baltimore’s homicide problem requires more than “just” tackling the issues of poverty, education or politics.  It requires that the people care enough about themselves and their city to redefine their own accessible future, together, and shape new politics and polemics around their own unified identity.

So what does all of this have to do with dog shit?

For Want of a Poop Bag, the Battle Was Lost…

I live in a neighborhood rife with dog owners, including me.  I walk my dog at least 5 times a day, and those jaunts give me lots of face time with the area’s sidewalks and tree boxes.

And they are, invariably, covered in shit.

As a random sample, I walked Rufus on Sunday afternoon and counted no fewer than 20 piles of dog shit left along the sidewalk in a 6 block radius.  Included among these roadside treats were deposits made in all but one of the tree boxes outside a nearby elementary school.  That’s right: out of nearly a dozen tree boxes located at the entrance to a gradeschool, all but one was home to a pile of shit.  Not one.  Not two.  All but one.

It says a lot about the character of a city when its people can’t be bothered to NOT leave steaming piles of dog shit at the doorway to their children’s schools.

Baltimore: Get Your Shit Together

Maybe I’m expecting too much of people.  Maybe because I clean up after my dog (and because it’s a law), I presume everyone else is naturally as interested in keeping their own neighborhood aesthetically pleasing (and free of health hazards).

Maybe I’m also being too reductive.  Surely a city’s societal woes can’t be encapsulated in the respect it shows to its own streets?  Perhaps I should look at other statistics, like Baltimore’s impeccable driving record.

Oh.  Never mind.

But don’t worry.  I get it.  I know life is hard and people are busy.  And maybe expecting you to take responsibility for what you do is elitist.  There is a recession, after all.  If it comes down to affording food or poop bags, I understand that feeding your kids trumps scraping your dog’s shit off your neighbor’s front steps.  We all have priorities.

But if you can’t clean up after your dog, don’t own a dog.  It’s that simple.  It’s about responsibility, accountability, leadership, good stewardship and being an adult.  It’s about understanding what you can handle vs. what’s beyond your grasp.

Most importantly, it’s about how you see yourself.

And as long as Baltimore continues to be a city that doesn’t mind being covered in shit, I’ll continue to be a resident who refrains from investing emotionally in a city that refuses to love itself.

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Now that Tiger Woods’s penis is costing millions of Americans their jobs, something has to be done about all this reckless celebrity behavior.  If it were just a sex scandal, we might have been able to laugh it off.  But as MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann has noted, Tiger Woods himself is an industry, and when he “takes a break” from golf, he takes the paychecks of everyone from baggage handlers to marketing executives with him.  No Tiger = no public interest in the PGA, and that = even more financial ruin than you can shake a 9-wood at.

So, should companies stop placing their seemingly-fragile brand image in the hands of entirely fallible humans whose occasional moral lapses are liable to rain Midas-like shame upon everything they touch in the eyes of our hyper-judgmental, media-saturated consumers?

Heavens no.  Instead, companies should conduct morality audits of their employees.  At least that’s what Mark Cenedella has suggested, and that he’s done so without any shred of visible irony means that somebody out there is probably taking it seriously.

In a nutshell, Cenedella says:

For the cost of a few hundred thousand per year — which would ultimately come out of the star’s pocket either directly or indirectly through lower endorsement fees — a security firm could act as a third-party morals auditor. An endorser’s business partner should know, long before the public, whether or not the star is engaging in behavior risky enough to potentially threaten the business.

Hmm… Insuring the future of your business against the moral transgressions of your employees?  Seems defensible.  (Perhaps Cenedella got the idea from Henry Ford, who used to send spies to evaluate his employees’ behavior in their homes.)

But what’s missing from this proposal?

How about an acknowledgment from the public that a company’s work or products are separate from the beliefs or actions of its people?

Or an awareness on the part of companies that hinging your own brand’s success on the star of someone outside the company is always a trust game?

Or the paradigm-shifting concept that everyone — from the company to the spokesperson to the public — is responsible and accountable for his or her own choices and actions as they happen, rather than rushing to blame or judging people pre-emptively or arbitrarily?

When a company hires a spokesperson, it’s rewarding that person for pretending to be a perfect embodiment of the company’s ideals.  Hence, the contract is already predicated on a lie.  So why, when the ugly truths are inevitably revealed, does that person who was already disproportionately compensated for his allegedly-positive image now pay an equally asymmetrical price for having committed mortal transgressions that wouldn’t have gotten the shipping guy fired?

This oversized reward-and-penalty system perpetuates the irrational, godlike mentality that causes someone like Tiger Woods to believe he has to apologize to the entire English-speaking world for something he should only be apologizing to his wife for.  But he wasn’t paid to only matter to his wife; he was paid to matter to all of us, and as such, he believes he does.

And here’s the real irony: Tiger Woods and his endless line of mistresses have presented us with what our President might call “a teaching moment,” in which we all have an opportunity to evaluate our own actions, our own images, and our own methods of taking responsibility for those actions.  And if the biggest lesson we take away from all of this is that companies need to better protect their financial assets from the blunderings of celebrity genitalia, then I’d say our teaching moment has passed.

Last week, I wrote about Spokeo, a service that lets people who barely know you find out more about you than either of you might realize.  But the problem isn’t the service itself — it’s our expectations of privacy, and our intentions for wanting privacy in the first place.

As Ian M. Rountree writes in his sharp-eyed post about the fallacy of privacy:

“Because anonymity is futile, we need to guard our manners.”

Services like Spokeo — or even just Facebook — dilute privacy to the point of meaninglessness.  Anything you’ve ever done online is increasingly searchable and findable by the people who want to do so, which makes obsessing over the things we want to keep hidden from them futile indeed.

On the other hand, secrets are now easier than ever to find — and, therefore, worth ever less to those seeking to destroy you.  (“Destroy you?” Someone has a high opinion of himself…)  Which means secrets are cheap, and muckraking is cheap, and tearing apart someone’s reputation by divulging their own worst actions means less and less as those worst actions are, by nature, becoming more and more public.

What Happens When the Skeletons in Your Closet Don’t Matter?

We impeached a president over a blow job.  We indicted a quarterback for murdering dogs.  We’re currently fascinated by whether or not a golf hero will survive the exposure of his seemingly endless adultery — not professionally, because such transgressions obviously never impacted his game, but publicly, “in the eyes of the people,” which is (we tell ourselves) all that really matters.

Except it isn’t.

What other people think of you matters infinitely less than what you do.  We’re taught this in gradeschool, and then we promptly forget it, because the rest of life is predicated on presumption, opinion and appearance.  Facades are a goldmine, while accomplishments (or a lack thereof) are quickly dismissed and easily forgotten.  And if that’s the case, why should failures be such taboo?

Everyone has secrets.  Everyone does things they’d prefer to keep quiet, or which seem to be in direct opposition with their public persona.  That’s life, and it’s the duality of human nature — we’re forever torn between who we wish we were and who we are right now.  Yet, paradoxically, whenever someone’s private secrets have been divulged and their public persona has been tarnished as a result, we become fascinated with the spectacle — despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the exact same thing (minus the fame) could happen to us.

People who never cared about golf a month ago are now riveted by the saga of Tiger Woods and his seemingly endless harem, and the only question asked more than “How did he get away with being such a duplicitous adulterer for so long and still play golf better than anyone else on the planet?” is “How will he handle this?”  Because as much as the public loves to see a good implosion, it’s also watching for instructions on how to handle this same kind of PR nightmare, should such an expose ever happen to them — or us — or you.

Because “public relations” isn’t actually about relating to the public; it’s about convincing the public that your own version of a story is the most relevant.  Nobody cares what actually happened; we only care about what the stories we tell each other mean, and who’s believing them.

Which is ironic, because who we are is always more interesting than who we pretend to be.