longreads

J.D. Roth on the Power of Personal Transformation

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J.D. Roth gave the closing keynote at this year’s World Domination Summit (WDS). I’ve followed J.D. Roth’s Get Rich Slowly blog for some time, but I wasn’t familiar with J.D.’s story. At WDS, Mr. Roth gave a remarkable speech titled “The Power of Personal Transformation“:

One day in algebra class, the girl behind me — Janine was her name — the girl behind me wrote something on the back of my shirt. I kept turning around to ask her to stop, but she kept writing. The other kids kept snickering. After class, I went to the bathroom to see what she’d written. There, in big block letters, was the word DICK. She’d written DICK on the back of my shirt.

That’s who I was. I was the bottom of the junior-high pecking order. I was a nerd. A geek. A loser. The other kids thought I was a dick. And slowly but surely, I began to believe them. In fact, as eighth grade progressed, I sank into a deep depression. I missed school. I withdrew. I became suicidal.

I remember coming home from school after one particularly horrific day — maybe even the same day Janine wrote the word DICK on the back of my shirt — I remember coming home to our trailer house, searching the cupboards for something to eat. I opened one of the kitchen drawers, and there I found a sharp knife. I took it out and sat at the table. For maybe five or ten minutes, I sat staring at the blade. I ran it over my wrist once or twice. “I could kill myself,” I thought. “I could kill myself and this would all be over.”

Fortunately, I didn’t have the guts.

Instead, I put the knife away and went to my bedroom to read X-Men comic books.

That was a turning point for me, a key experience in my young life. As I sat at the table with knife in hand, I made a decision. I knew I wasn’t a dick. I knew I was a good guy. Why didn’t other people? I decided to change. I decided that the next year, when I started high school, I’d do new things. I’d make new friends.

And so I did.

I am happy for J.D.:

After I paid off my debt, I began to wonder how I could apply the lessons I’d learned to other parts of my life. If I could transform my personal finances, could I transform my fitness? My personality? My relationships? Turns out, the answer is “yes”. In fact, it’s a resounding yes.

But the biggest change of all, and the most important one, is that today I’m happy. That’s probably the defining facet of my existence. A decade ago, I was unhappy. Even a year ago, I was unhappy. Not today. Sure, there are things I want to change, but have no doubt: I have an awesome life.

J.D. talked about the three components for making a striking personal transformation:

  • The power of yes. Yes is an open mind. Yes is a willingness to try new things. Yes is allowing yourself to be vulnerable.
  • The power of focus. The ability to focus only on those things that are most important.
  • The power of action. The strength to work hard, to get things done.

It was an incredible speech. I think the video might be available eventually, but for now, the best thing you can do is read J.D.’s speech on the Get Rich Slowly blog. It’s a must-read.

Walter Kirn: Confessions of an Ex-Mormon

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Walter Kirn, the National Correspondent at The New Republic, writes a poignant story of becoming a Mormon and then renouncing the religion. The fresh American start promised by the Church of Latter Day Saints “didn’t turn out like that”:

My stated excuse for sneaking away from Mormonism was skepticism about its doctrines, but I’d learned that most Mormons don’t grasp all the teachings of Joseph Smith—nor do they credit all the ones they do grasp. After the bus trip to Eden, holy Missouri never came up again in conversation. As for the future temple in Independence, I found out that the spot where Smith said it would rise belonged to a Mormon splinter sect with a U.S. membership of about 1,000. The “sacred underwear”? It was underwear. Everyone wears it, so why not make it sacred? Why not make everything sacred? It is, in some ways. And most sacred of all are people, not wondrous stories, whose job is to help people feel their sacredness. Sometimes the stories don’t work, or they stop working. Forget about them; find others. Revise. Refocus. A church is the people in it, and their errors. The errors they make while striving to get things right.

But I didn’t have the patience, or the humility. I wasn’t a son of stubborn pioneers. I was the son of the lawyer on the plane who’d suffered the breakdown I thought I could avoid. I left the Church as abruptly as I’d entered it. No formalities, no apologies, no goodbyes.

Highly recommend reading in its entirety. If you’re wondering what else Walter Kirn is also known for: writing the book Up in the Air, which inspired a film of the same name starring George Clooney. It’s an excellent film.

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(via @Longreads)

On Making Friends After College

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This piece in The New York Times on making friends after college resonated with me deeply. Personally, I have found that I have lost connections with some of the people I bonded in college. More importnatly, I’ve found it exceedingly challenging to make friends after college (and graduate school).

Our story is not unusual. In your 30s and 40s, plenty of new people enter your life, through work, children’s play dates and, of course, Facebook. But actual close friends — the kind you make in college, the kind you call in a crisis — those are in shorter supply.

As people approach midlife, the days of youthful exploration, when life felt like one big blind date, are fading. Schedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends.

No matter how many friends you make, a sense of fatalism can creep in: the period for making B.F.F.’s, the way you did in your teens or early 20s, is pretty much over. It’s time to resign yourself to situational friends: K.O.F.’s (kind of friends) — for now.

The three conditions on why making friends becomes difficult as one enters their 30s:

As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added.

Good read in its entirety.

What are some things you’ve done to make friends after college? I am really curious.

Exploring New York Through Pickup Basketball

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Isaac Eger moved to New York City on a whim: no job, no girlfriend, no aspirations. But he had one curiosity: the city’s mythical ownership of pickup basketball. Were its legendary courts just New York hype? He set out exploring the pick-up courts in what he describes as a “a little stream of consciousness, a little underreported, full of a bunch of first names and first impressions”:

If New York is the city that never sleeps, it is probably because the city never shuts up.

Drowning the shriek of sneakers and the clangs of missed shots is the constant trash talk from the players on and off the court.

“Shoot it! I dare you!”

“You ain’t got nothing.”

“I’m gonna score from the block next time. Wait and see.”

Players on the city’s courts comment on what you wear, how you look, how you smell, what you do, how you blink and breathe. Cries and hoots from the sidelines fill the park when someone gets crossed, blocked or dunked on.

On being close:

Though everything seems to be less than an hour away, people do not appear too inclined to venture far beyond their neighborhood. Perhaps there is a level of comfort that comes with picking a court and sticking with it — like picking your favorite bar or cigarette brand. All of the players seem to know one another’s nicknames, tricks and extended families.

The city’s busy, congested courts have influenced the style of play that takes place on them. For instance, I haven’t run across many pure shooters, but I have encountered a lot of athletes with wicked ball-handling skills. My theory is that because the courts here are so packed with players, there is not enough time or space to practice jump shots.

That is why so many shooters, I suspect, are cornfed boys from the Midwest and prep schoolers from the suburbs: the country and sprawl quarantine them, and they have nothing to do but practice fundamentals by their lonesome.

His conclusion on the guys he played with on the courts:

We weren’t going to be friends. Ever.

But teammates? Perhaps.

How to Deliver a Perfect Compliment

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Finding the perfect compliment isn’t a riddle at all. It’s not as though there’s one for every person at every time. It’s a matter of finding the right moment rather than insisting on one.

The quote above is from a really, really great piece by Tom Chiarella titled “The Perfect Compliment.” Tom goes on assignment trying to come up with the perfect compliment (if it exists). In the beginning, it’s all a numbers game to him: he encounters strangers and dishes out one liners: “Nice Shoes. Great tie.” One day, he delivers more than 1,000 compliments…

But then, as his observation of compliments grows, he re-engineers his technique. As he writes:

If a worthwhile compliment needs anything, it is the weight of realization behind it. So I fell back, watched people go about their jobs, the quality of their interactions, the way they looked at their reflection as they walked the street. I registered. And I learned, or started to learn, that a compliment is a partnership, because the pleasure of giving it lies in its effect upon the person receiving it. What I’d been doing was little more than a salesman’s trick, poorly played. I’d succeeded only in making myself bold enough to broadcast my judgments — dry little seeds spun out on the lawn of humanity — on the fly. I had to risk a little connection.

His compliments become more interesting and from the heart:

All I can say is, that is a classy umbrella. It looks old-timey and right for you.

My mother always wanted me to wear a corduroy coat like that. Now I see why.

Near the end of his adventure, Tom’s decision was to deliver one genuine compliment, one that would be heartfelt but also move the recipient:

In the end, the compliments I came up with were tailored and quirky in the best way. Most of all, they were thorough. I liked delivering them. I enjoyed plumbing the reactions. I sometimes considered for days what I would say before delivering one. Or I’d run after someone for my one chance to say what needed to be said. I’d sit in the broad doorway of the coffee shop for an entire day, feet in the sunshine, shoulders in the cool. I did not go on the hunt anymore. I scanned for a single, worthy compliment in the craw of each day.

Tom Chiarella, you have written a wonderful piece. I hope others can learn from you.

Why Are American Kids Spoiled?

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Elizabeth Kolbert, writing for The New Yorker, on why American kids are spoiled compared to their counterparts elsewhere in the world. Here, she compares the children of Matsigenka, a tribe of about twelve thousand people who live in the Peruvian Amazon, to the children of parents living in Los Angeles:

Ochs and Izquierdo noted, in their paper on the differences between the family lives of the Matsigenka and the Angelenos, how early the Matsigenka begin encouraging their children to be useful. Toddlers routinely heat their own food over an open fire, they observed, while “three-year-olds frequently practice cutting wood and grass with machetes and knives.” Boys, when they are six or seven, start to accompany their fathers on fishing and hunting trips, and girls learn to help their mothers with the cooking. As a consequence, by the time they reach puberty Matsigenka kids have mastered most of the skills necessary for survival. Their competence encourages autonomy, which fosters further competence—a virtuous cycle that continues to adulthood.

The cycle in American households seems mostly to run in the opposite direction. So little is expected of kids that even adolescents may not know how to operate the many labor-saving devices their homes are filled with. Their incompetence begets exasperation, which results in still less being asked of them (which leaves them more time for video games). Referring to the Los Angeles families, Ochs and Izquierdo wrote, “Many parents remarked that it takes more effort to get children to collaborate than to do the tasks themselves.”

One way to interpret these contrary cycles is to infer that Americans have a lower opinion of their kids’ capacities. And, in a certain sense, this is probably true: how many parents in Park Slope or Brentwood would trust their three-year-olds to cut the grass with a machete? But in another sense, of course, it’s ridiculous. Contemporary American parents—particularly the upscale sort that “unparenting” books are aimed at—tend to take a highly expansive view of their kids’ abilities. Little Ben may not be able to tie his shoes, but that shouldn’t preclude his going to Brown.

On comparing the two cultures:

When anthropologists study cultures like the Matsigenkas’, they tend to see patterns. The Matsigenka prize hard work and self-sufficiency. Their daily rituals, their child-rearing practices, and even their folktales reinforce these values, which have an obvious utility for subsistence farmers. Matsigenka stories often feature characters undone by laziness; kids who still don’t get the message are rubbed with an itch-inducing plant.

In contemporary American culture, the patterns are more elusive. What values do we convey by turning our homes into warehouses for dolls? By assigning our kids chores and then rewarding them when they screw up? By untying and then retying their shoes for them? It almost seems as if we’re actively trying to raise a nation of “adultescents.” And, perhaps without realizing it, we are.

Pretty good read, even if the answers are elusive.

The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever

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Michael Mooney recounts the story of Bill Fong, who came oh-so-close to bowling a 900: three consecutive perfect games.

Read until the end, because there is a killer twist that you can’t miss…

Aside from bowling, Bill Fong hasn’t had a lot of success in life. His Chinese mother demanded perfection, but he was a C student. He never finished college, he divorced young, and he never made a lot of money. By his own account, his parents didn’t like him much. As a bowler, his average in the high 230s means he’s probably better than anyone you know. But he’s still only tied as the 15th best bowler in Plano’s most competitive league. Almost nothing in life has gone according to plan. 

He likes to say he got his approach to bowling from the hard-hitting alleys in his native Chicago, where he went to high school with Michelle Obama. He was one of the few kids from Chinatown interested in bowling at the time. Despite his strict mother and the fact that his friends were all on the honor roll, little William preferred sports. He dreamed of being a professional athlete one day. He wasn’t big—too short for basketball, too slender for football—but he’d run up and down the block as a boy, racing imaginary friends. 

When Fong was young, his parents divorced. He remembers the man who would become his stepdad taking his mom out on dates to a local bowling alley, where they could bring the kids. He noticed that when he was bowling, he wasn’t thinking about whatever was going on behind him. His mind could focus on the ball, the lane, the pins—and the rest of the world would disappear. He had never been captivated by anything like that. 

A must-read, captivating story.

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(HT: Annie Lowrey)

How the Mexican Drug Cartel Operates

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Patrick Keefe’s New York Times Magazine piece on the Mexican cartel is one of the best things I’ve read this year, and certainly one of the best things I’ve read this month. He goes in depth on the operations of the Mexican drug cartel, its relationship with clients, suppliers, politicians, and law enforcement personnel. I couldn’t stop reading it…

On the Sinaloa cartel and its distribution:

The Sinaloa cartel can buy a kilo of cocaine in the highlands of Colombia or Peru for around $2,000, then watch it accrue value as it makes its way to market. In Mexico, that kilo fetches more than $10,000. Jump the border to the United States, and it could sell wholesale for $30,000. Break it down into grams to distribute retail, and that same kilo sells for upward of $100,000 — more than its weight in gold. And that’s just cocaine. Alone among the Mexican cartels, Sinaloa is both diversified and vertically integrated, producing and exporting marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine as well.

On the drug war in Mexico and the cartel’s ability to thrive in the recession:

The drug war in Mexico has claimed more than 50,000 lives since 2006. But what tends to get lost amid coverage of this epic bloodletting is just how effective the drug business has become. A close study of the Sinaloa cartel, based on thousands of pages of trial records and dozens of interviews with convicted drug traffickers and current and former officials in Mexico and the United States, reveals an operation that is global (it is active in more than a dozen countries) yet also very nimble and, above all, staggeringly complex. Sinaloa didn’t merely survive the recession — it has thrived in recent years. And after prevailing in some recent mass-casualty clashes, it now controls more territory along the border than ever.

On how modern technology isn’t stopping the drugs from crossing the U.S. border (the catapult bit):

Moving cocaine is a capital-intensive business, but the cartel subsidizes these investments with a ready source of easy income: marijuana. Cannabis is often described as the “cash crop” of Mexican cartels because it grows abundantly in the Sierras and requires no processing. But it’s bulkier than cocaine, and smellier, which makes it difficult to conceal. So marijuana tends to cross the border far from official ports of entry. The cartel makes sandbag bridges to ford the Colorado River and sends buggies loaded with weed bouncing over the Imperial Sand Dunes into California. Michael Braun, the former chief of operations for the D.E.A., told me a story about the construction of a high-tech fence along a stretch of border in Arizona. “They erect this fence,” he said, “only to go out there a few days later and discover that these guys have a catapult, and they’re flinging hundred-pound bales of marijuana over to the other side.” He paused and looked at me for a second. “A catapult,” he repeated. “We’ve got the best fence money can buy, and they counter us with a 2,500-year-old technology.”

A wise reminder:

There’s a reason coke and heroin cost so much more on the street than at the farm gate: you’re not paying for the drugs; you’re compensating everyone along the distribution chain for the risks they assumed in getting them to you.

And:

Smugglers often negotiate, in actuarial detail, about who will be held liable in the event of lost inventory. After a bust, arrested traffickers have been known to demand a receipt from authorities, so that they can prove the loss was not because of their own negligence (which would mean they might have to pay for it) or their own thievery (which would mean they might have to die). Some Colombian cartels have actually offered insurance policies on narcotics, as a safeguard against loss or seizure.

On corruption being king:

The surest way to stay out of trouble in the drug business is to dole out bribes, and promiscuously. Drug cartels don’t pay corporate taxes, but a colossus like Sinaloa makes regular payments to the federal, state and municipal authorities that may well rival the effective tax rate in Mexico. When the D.E.A. conducted an internal survey of its top 50 operatives and informants several years ago and asked them to name the most important factor for running a drug business, they replied, overwhelmingly, corruption…The cartel bribes mayors and prosecutors and governors, state police and federal police, the army, the navy and a host of senior officials at the national level.

An anecdote of one man’s accumulation of cash while working for the cartel:

In 2007, Mexican authorities raided the home of Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese-Mexican businessman who is believed to have supplied meth-precursor chemicals to the cartel, and discovered $206 million, the largest cash seizure in history. And that was the money Zhenli held onto — he was an inveterate gambler, who once blew so much cash in Las Vegas that one of the casinos presented him, in consolation, with a Rolls-Royce.

There is so much more in the piece. Set aside half an hour and read the whole thing.

A Vintage Crime

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In the latest issue of Vanity Fair, Michael Steinberger writes a fascinating story about Rudy Kurniawan, a 31-year-old Indonesian transplant living in the United States and producing counterfeit wine. “A Vintage Crime” is a story of a man who sold $35 million worth of wine in 2006, yet just a few months later was begging for loans. A slow rise but a strong fall, as he now faces up to 80 years in jail.

A bit of background:

Beginning in the early 2000s, demand and prices for the rarest wines shot up rapidly, as did the potential payoff from selling fakes. In 2000, wine auctions worldwide grossed $92 million; by last year, that figure had quintupled, to $478 million. The buying frenzy was driven in large part by young collectors in the United States. In contrast to the more buttoned-down Thurston Howell types who had once dominated the auction scene, these new players were distinguished by their insatiable acquisitiveness and eagerness to flaunt their trophy bottles.

No one moved the market more than a twentysomething West Coast collector named Rudy Kurniawan. He first surfaced on the wine scene in the early 2000s. He was reportedly the scion of a wealthy ethnic-Chinese family from Indonesia. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, in 2006, he explained that Kurniawan was an Indonesian surname his late father had given him to protect his identity. He said that his family had business interests in Indonesia and China, but refused to elaborate.

How Kurwinian’s forgery binge began: by getting the empty bottles of the super-expensive wine bottles:

According to John Kapon, he and Kurniawan met at a wine dinner in Los Angeles. In October 2004, they and some acquaintances went on a four-day binge at Cru that became an emblematic moment for the brash new wine culture that had taken hold. By the end of the last evening, the group had consumed a murderers’ row of legendary wines—1945 Mouton Rothschild, 1961 Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle, 1971 La Tâche, 1964 Romanée-Conti, 1978 Guigal Côte-Rôtie La Mouline—and racked up a total tab that one participant said was more than $250,000. Kurniawan paid for the whole thing with his American Express Black Card. He also made a curious request of Cru’s staff: he asked that the restaurant send him all of the empty bottles. He made the same request on subsequent visits to Cru, and between 2004 and 2006 the restaurant sent him box after box of empty bottles.

On Kurniawan’s eccentricities:

He often slept until the afternoon and was maddeningly disorganized, habitually arriving late for engagements and seldom paying bills on time. He also had eccentricities: Wilfred Jaeger, a Bay Area wine collector, says that Kurniawan had a habit of falling asleep at tastings; he would suddenly nod off for 20 or 30 minutes before waking up and resuming drinking. Kurniawan’s mother lived with him in Arcadia, and he sometimes brought her to tastings.

Upon his capture:

In addition to thousands of fake labels for wines such as Romanée-Conti, there were dozens of rubber stamps marked with vintages and winery names; a gadget for inserting corks into bottles; California wines whose labels bore handwritten notes suggesting that they would be passed off as Bordeaux; and dozens of bottles in various stages of being converted to counterfeits.

A thoroughly engrossing read. If anything, this story reinforced my belief in how fickle the rare-wine market truly is.

What Did the First Fictional Aliens Look Like?

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A recent release of sci-film films (Men in Black, Prometheus) has Laura Miller at The New Yorker wondering: what did the first fictional aliens look like?

For all their diversity, these creatures tend to fall into one of two groups: those we can live with and those we can’t. This summer, Hollywood franchises espousing each view will be delivering their newest installments. The genial “Men in Black” movies suggest that freaky-looking extraterrestrials already live among us, undetected by most citizens and overseen by an agency made up of weary bureaucrats and blasé field officers. The films are an extended pun on the alternate meaning of “alien”: immigrant. Far grimmer is “Prometheus,” the latest “Alien” movie; the series features an implacable foe that uses our bodies as nests for its young, and likes to chase us through hideous, dripping corridors while baring its hideous, dripping fangs.

Before the nineteenth century, if authors depicted the inhabitants of other planets the aliens were essentially human. The suave Saturnian described by Voltaire in a satirical 1752 story, “Micromégas,” looks like an earthling, except that he’s six thousand feet tall. (And he has a Continental spirit, keeping a mistress—a “pretty little brunette, barely six hundred and sixty fathoms high.”) The Saturnian’s primary fictional purpose, as he visits our planet, is to marvel at the relative puniness of humankind, whom he examines with a very large microscope.

It’s a very good thought piece, researched extensively.