Out of the mouths of babes again...

Our friends Kev and Charlene told us a lovely thing the other day. Last week their 13 year old daughter Robyn was having a conversation with her friend, who was telling her all about what a smashing house she had. Big. Well appointed. A TV in every room - eight, I believe the total TV count was. Robyn's family have a lot less tellies than that. "But your house is just a house," she said, plainly unimpressed by the high gadget stats. "Mine's a home. It's full of love."

I confidently expect her to be a very well adjusted teenager. Lesson for us all there I think.

How to dress for a Dragon

Being quite a fan of entrepreneurial investment reality TV show The Dragons' Den, I was chuffed to see that they were showing back-to-back episodes on cable TV last weekend. (In case you're not familiar with it, the idea is that budding entrepreneurs pitch to a panel of 5 successful business folk - the "Dragons" - and try to persuade them to invest in their idea or business.) Seeing so many together, I picked up on something I'd not really noticed before. Peter Jones, one of the Dragons, is really picky about appearances.

You can see his point of view. Complete strangers come before him to say, "Here's my idea, I'd like you to trust me with £150,000 of your money to turn it into a lucrative business." He's going to want to get the impression that they know what they're talking about and are committed to doing whatever's necessary to make it a success. And presentation's part of that. The ones who turn up in jeans and a shirt, unless they have a really brilliant idea, often get a roasting from him on that very point.

Most people take it in pretty good part, and chalk it up as a lesson learnt. There was one guy though who got incedibly prickly and defensive about it. Actually he sounded rather like a teenager pouting and insisting he had a right to dress how he liked. The Dragons were being utter brutes. He really felt he DESERVED their money, and virtually had a tantrum when he didn't get it. It was almost "The only reason you won't give me your money is you don't understand me."

Unfortunately he didn't get that the thing about business is that it's not personal. If it has rules and conventions you're expected to follow, that's not an attack on your individuality.

Sunshine after the pain

My friend Jeanne can always be relied on to bring a family-sized ray of sunshine to things. She recently got very ill while away in Kyrgyzstan. It was all very scary, but she made a speedy recovery and is now back home and on very good form. What has she to say about it? "Well, I've forgotten the pain. What I remember is how wonderful everyone was." Now there's a brilliant way of looking at things.

Thanks for that Jeanne. Note to self: when experiencing / recalling pain, have a stab at noticing how wonderful everyone is / was being.

Trail story or fauxtation?

Mountain bikers - well, male ones - are fond of saying "Chicks dig scars," with varying degrees of irony. Of course the truth is pretty much the opposite. Women find scars unsightly and icky. In fact, it's men that dig scars. We see them as trophies of our manly achievements. The more pointless the better, of course.

However, there's always exceptions. Last week I was out biking with some folk from the MTBing egroup I subscribe to. One of them told the rest of us about the time he came a cropper on his bike and ended up with some nice juicy scabs on the side of his face. For the next week or so, while they healed, the dinner lady at the work canteen came over all maternal and piled on extra helpings onto his plate. It seems dinnerladies dig scars.

I'm not sure if "Dinnerladies dig scars" qualifies as a fauxtation. I'd love to think it does.

Take the Fame! part 2

More thoughts about acknowledgment.

"Blow your own trumpet. Otherwise no-one will hear your music."

One trap you can fall into about recognising how great you are is that by accepting that you're good at stuff, you're implicitly saying other people aren't. In other words, it's a competition, and by acknowledging yourself you push other people off the podium. Well, that would just be so bitchy of you, wouldn't it?

But it isn't a competition. Everyone has their own talents and greatnesses. And spending your whole life pretending you're not that good at stuff in case you hurt anyone's feelings makes no sense. Not only do you hobble your own happiness by doing that - you deprive the world of the fruits of your talents. Think of how your life is enriched by talented people - your favourite singers, artists, writers, film makers, sportspeople, whoever. Don't forget the people around you - their talents enrich your life too. Don't they?

So, check out your greatnesses and embrace them. The more you can say to yourself "Yes, I'm talented / funny / creative," the more you can share your talents with others.

Self and selfishness

"I've got to stop being so selfish. It just doesn't get me what I want."

A king amongst fauxtations there, from the mouth of a work colleague of a friend of mine.

This guy is apparently so selfish that he was allegedly unaware of the irony of his remark. We did laugh when my chum shared it with me afterwards in the pub. It does point to an interesting paradox though. It's often true that being selfish doesn't get you what you want. So is the reverse true? Is being unselfish ultimately self-interested?

Q: Why would I be unselfish?
A: To be thoughtful to others.
Q: What for?
A: So they like me, or think well of me, or do me a favour in return some day, or so I bank a bit of good karma.

One thing I do know about being selfish is that it's BAD. So can an act only be good if I don't get anything out of it? So if people like me or help me out or whatever I've done a bad thing? I put it to you, ladeez and gennelmen, that this is pretty screwy logic. The flaw here is thinking that there can only be one winner. It's important to look after yourself. If you don't, you'll be in no condition to do anything for anyone else anyway. If you don't have fun, you won't be much fun to be with. (Ooo, two fauxtations in one post. Got to be a record.)

Maybe there's another angle. Selfishness is thinking only of yourself, right? What if being unselfish is purely and simply allowing yourself to connect with others? Rather than something that's measured in terms of whether or not you take the last biscuit from the plate.

I wonder if that's what this guy was thinking?

Hurray for the smoking ban!

So I heard today that after 18 months of smoking being banned from pubs in Scotland, heart attacks are down by a wonderful 17%. I thought it was a good idea, but that's a brilliant result.

Naturally, quality of air in these same establishments has dramatically improved too. Although it wasn't always so. I remember going into my esteemed local, the Cask and Barrel, on the first night of the smoking ban. As expected, there was no trace of smokey smells. In its place however, was a rather more embarassing and pungent scent - punters. It really, really stank. I've not encountered body odour like it since - well, ever.

There's a happy ending though. Only a week later I returned, though not without a certain degree of trepidation. (Well, it is a very good pub. I wasn't going to give up on it that easily.) And hey presto - no smell. It would seem that the regulars had caught on very rapidly, and all rushed out in the intervening week and invested in deodorant.

So all the scare stories about takings in pubs nose-diving can be happily offset by the boom in personal hygiene. Another benefit of the jolly old smoking ban. Hurrah!

Take the Fame! part 1

"You can't be who you are until you acknowledge who you are."

There we are, a fauxtation from my own pen.

It sounds simple and self evident - you need to recognise your strengths and your talents before you can use them. If you think you're crap, it's pretty hard to be anything else. But acknowledging yourself can be a real struggle. There's all sorts of barriers we can have about it. Modesty's so drummed into us - mustn't blow your own trumpet, don't want to end up being arrogant, etc etc etc. You have to shed the modesty though before you can take a good honest look at who you are and share it with other people.

The first thing to get is that you can't be talented and modest. It doesn't work. Either you completely suppress your talent and keep it a secret, or you use and express your talents and pretend to be modest. Which gets very hard to distinguish from the arrogance we're so afraid of.

Being who you are is simply self expression. It's authenticity, it's honesty, it's being real. Modesty, just as much as arrogance, is a pretence, an egotistical lie which seeks to manipulate. Horrible, isn't it? Well, it's not that awful really. Modesty and arrogance are concepts we learn pretty early, basic building blocks from when we're first getting to grips with social relations as children. Nobody wants their kids to get picked on because they're big-headed.

As adults, we can trust ourselves to be more subtle. We just need to remember to move on.

"I believe that children are our future..."

So the song goes - it's the opening line of The Greatest Love of All, by Stevie Wonder I think (consider me at home and open to correction on this one, though I'm already aware that Whitney Houston covered it). Social anthropologists tell us that in times of rapid change, people look to the younger generations. That's an interesting thought. What ways do we actually do that, given that our world is certainly a rapidly changing one?

Well, there's the obvious stuff, such as when parents get their kids to show them how to use the computer. Then there's the next layer - when adults eagerly pick up on stuff the kids use as being the next great thing. I'm thinking of Facebook, Myspace, YouTube and all that. Once they were glorified chat rooms, now any self-respecting web marketing consultant will urge you to establish your presence on them. The same could apply to anything. Pop music, for example. What started off as the music of the devil is now an essential component of the national economy. So the methods and substance of business become increasingly shaped by the young.

I find myself wondering what my point is here. I suppose it's that maybe this has something to do with how those of us who aren't quite as youthful any more find the young at large more unsettling, while also generally seeking to have closer relationships with our kids than we felt our own parents did with us. (Generalisation index set to maximum here, but maybe you get the picture.)

What do you reckon?

Attachment and celebrity

Great program last night about the history of India. There's been a lot of these lately as you may have noticed, and this one was presented by historian and Alexander the Great enthusiast Michael Wood. He dealt with the period of and immediately following the Buddha - 500BC onwards. It put a few things in a new perspective for me about the Buddha and Buddhism. For one, I hadn't really considered what was so revolutionary about his deceptively simple core message: life is suffering, and suffering is caused by being attached to things. Even if it seems tough to put into practice, we can all at least understand that. We're all aware of the suffering of wanting what you can't have, or can't have yet, and that if we weren't quite so materialistic life would be more relaxing.

Of course, India already had a long tradition of ascetics who renounced the material world - the Buddha himself started out as one. The really challenging part is that this extends to gods - you can be attached to gods and what they promise, just as much as to possessions. Given that India is a country of 33 million gods, it becomes plain that the Buddha was the daddy of all iconoclasts.

I also hadn't considered quite how modern buddhism feels. It almost appears odd to me that it originated in the Iron Age. It seems strange that a time so far before industrialisation and the modern world could have had anything like our need for buddhism's message of detachment. In particular perhaps, detachment from the cult of celebrity and fame that Princess Diana's memorial service is such a symbol of.

Maybe it could be said that we live in a time of 33 million celebrities.