For a Seller of Books and Music Products, It Seemed Like the Mother Lode, and Still Does. But It Has Also Turned Out to Be a Remarkable Window on a Gifted and Disturbed Mind

It started as purely a business transaction—a coup, it seemed then and still does. Seventy-two moving boxes (12x13x16 inches in size), each packed like a sardine tin with books, CDs, audio tapes or photograph records. We bid $1,000 and got the lot. It took a rental trailer and a pick-up truck (and my brother-in-law’s generous help) to get all this to our double-car garage out back. My rotator cuff injury ached for days. And that was only the beginning.

The thousands of items had to be unboxed, one at a time, and catalogued for our online bookstore, Brain Books To Go, and the other services where we sell reading and listening materials. That, obviously, was the initial attraction. What we didn’t realize at the time was our thousand dollars had done more than simply glut our intellectual properties’ supply line for several months. We’d also acquired a window on a remarkable, and remarkably shattered, brain.

We knew going in that this collection carried a “must-sell” urgency because its compiler was in a coma from which he was not expected to emerge. We heard vaguely that he had suffered a lifetime of schizophrenia. That added an element of intrigue to the deal, because we purchased the library blind. The items were already packaged when we bought them.

Months later, we’ve opened every box and have examined every item. And I must report that it has been a singular experience for us.

Sherry took charge of the CDs, audio tapes and albums. I took the books. Both categories, though, produced the same response. Our minds boggling over another mind’s remarkable achievement, given the obvious depth of its despair and brokenness.

Sherry gave me a guided tour through the albums, the audio tapes and the CDs the other night. She’s put them in clusters alphabetically by artist. It appears that our archivist started in the late 1960s. For the rest of that decade and in the ‘70s and ‘80s, it was all albums. The Beatles, Grateful Dead, Beach Boys, Marshall Tucker Band, Abba, Kenny Rogers, Jimi Hendrix—those names and many others we recognized, even though their album photos often pictured them earlier in their careers than we remembered. And then there were hundreds of singles by performers we weren’t familiar with at all: Dan Fogelberg, Lee Michaels, Savoy Brown, Lightfoot, The Jim Carroll Band and Barclay James Harvest, to name a handful I turned up at random while rifling through Sherry’s orderly storage system.

In the ‘80s, our archivist turned to audio tapes. And in the 1990s and the 21st Century, to CDs. Not an unprecedented undertaking, of course. There are thousands of collectors worldwide of this sort of thing. But when combined with the book collection, we’ve been made to realize that our potential “white elephant” purchase has thrust us into the role of archeologists for a mind that, if deeply troubled, was also profoundly gifted, active and productive.

Because the same thoroughness that made his music products collection a veritable “history” of what music producers were packaging over nearly four decades did the same for his book collection.

Clearly, he didn’t buy everything. But it is difficult to think of a title … or a writer … of importance that he missed. At one point I had to wonder, “Will I ever get all of his copies of Anthony Trollope’s works catalogued?” But I quickly forgot Trollope because then came Dickens. Book after book after book. Some a bit bunged up, but many brand new. Eleven, spankin’ clean volumes of The Diary of Samuel Pepys. The entire set of the gorgeously printed and bound Library of America series. Copy after copy of the prodigious Oxford University Press’s dictionaries and anthologies and histories and “companions to.” Somehow, he either got on the mailing lists of or prowled the bookstore stacks housing the publications of numerous university presses, and certainly the biggest and busiest: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, the State Universities of New York, Berkeley, Stanford, North Carolina, Indiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska and on and on. But then he also purchased practically every book Billy Graham has written. And Robert Schuller. And Joan Didion. And John Grisham. He bought copious numbers of books about military history. And race relations. About philosophy and literary criticism. (And languages. He never seemed to have passed up a Berlitz “learn to speak it yourself”-type tape set and instructional book. But not just Italian or Japanese. The languages of the Lakota Sioux, and the Shoshoni, and the Navajo—he had those sets, too.)

But did he actually read any of his books? As I kept moving through box after box of the best and the most acclaimed (and sometimes not so acclaimed) of 300 years of writing in the English language, I had my doubts. But then by-the-bye I’d pick up one of Oxford U. Press’s 1,200-page tomes, for example, and there deep in its bowels I’d notice a series of repetitive notes. “I read this … I read this …I read this … I read this,” he’d pen in his small, slightly irregular handwriting.

And then I discovered the journals. We’d been told by one of the workers who had packaged all this about the journals. He said they were just spiral-bound notebooks filled with gibberish and they’d tossed them in the trash. But not all of them. I found a half-dozen. And it was in them that the extent of his illness became instantly and achingly clear. And also, the extent of his devotion and passion to his collections.

I’ll not quote a single word from his notebooks. It would be a violation of his copyright, not to mention his privacy. But leave it said that he read copiously. He would plan the night before to read Doftoevsky or William James or Eugene O’Neill the following day. He might even have a favorite chapter in mind (indicating that he’d read it before), and would note how eager he was to place a checkmark by it once he was finished. Every day for years, he wrote a single page about each day of his hopeless fragmented life. When he reached the end of a page and a day, he stopped, often in mid-sentence. Yes, he read a lot in his books. And, no, he couldn’t possibly have done more than open many of them a time or two, if that.

We understand that he did emerge from his coma. That he is now being cared for in a health facility in the Midwest. We wish him every solace that contemporary medicine of the mind can offer. And we wonder if the store clerks checking out his endless purchases over the decades had any idea of the chaos in the brain they were conversing with.

Posted on May 27, 2006

Dear Amanda, Twelve Years Later I'm Wondering if You Have Gotten Any Closer to Answering Your Own Question?

In a used bookstore earlier this week, I discovered this note, written on the inside cover of a copy of Karen Armstrong's work, A History of God, in the still-childish hand of a young woman wise beyond her years:

"Dad, which is it? is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders? Love, Amanda, Christmas '94."

Posted on May 19, 2006

ADD Expert Edward Hallowell Extends His Theories and Insights from the Specific to the General—And Concludes We're Headed Pell-Mell Towards "Some Epochal Phase Change"

My buddy Paul Kordis of Fort Collins, CO forwards this excerpt from Edward Hallowell's new work, CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD:

Our peculiar times seem to be leading up to some epochal phase change, comparable to what happens to physical bodies when they reach a certain temperature or speed. How fast can we go, how busy can we get before we fundamentally change? Wherever we’re headed, we’re headed there fast.

We’ve heard predictions, most of which we ignore because we don’t know what else to do with them. Whether it’s economic distress due to global competition and our own overspending, or physical distress due to global warming and our own misuse of the planet, or pandemic illness due to a resistant virus, or political distress due to global power shifts and our own misuse of power, we are aware of the dangers that might soon cataclysmically change our lives for the worse....

Life today teeters on a pinnacle surrounded by a sea of uncertainty. And so it did well before 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Yet, buoyed by perhaps unreasonable optimism, we work harder than ever, trying to hold on to what we have and to make it better. You don’t see many people giving up. Just the opposite. Most people are working as hard as they can. Through hard work coupled with cockeyed optimism and smart decisions, we rise to the peculiar challenges of life today.

But the challenges are peculiar and daunting, more so than most of us realize. For example, how much do you really know about global warming? I didn’t know much, but because I wanted to get an expert’s view on an important issue I didn’t understand in order to show how busyness can keep a person (me) from keeping up with issues that really matter, I called Jim Anderson, professor of chemistry at Harvard and one of the world’s experts on climate. He told me he was “not sanguine” (that’s professorese for scared as hell) having looked at the latest data showing how much of the polar ice cap had already melted. As he went into the gory details, the part of my mind that can no longer hear about Big Problems I Can’t Solve went numb. And global warming is just one of the many challenges we face. AIDS. Resistant bacteria and viruses. Deforestation. A national debt like we’ve never had before, plus an emerging China holding so many of our notes. The unexplained rise in asthma, autism, allergies, and Asperger’s syndrome. Terrorism....

From physics to friendships, from cosmology to cameras and computers, from what we do and what our children do to how we keep track of what we do and how others keep track of us, from what your employer can promise you to the lifestyle you can expect, everywhere you look, what was familiar has changed. No one knows what will be, what to hold on to, and what to reject.

While politicians and policy makers offer simplistic solutions to calm our nerves and quiet us down, the wise among us know that this world is so complex and unpredictable that simplistic solutions will leave people lost, disappointed, and ill equipped to thrive in tomorrow’s world, like people who can memorize but who can’t think.

And a bunch of our most difficult problems, such as global warming, are likely to get worse. Sunday's Los Angeles Times has a piece about how the economies of the developing world—in particular, China, India, Russia and Brazil—are growing at more than twice the rate of the economies of the developed nations. No one appears to be learning very much from the dangers demonstrated by the United States' exploitation of the Achiever (as we call it at Brain Technologies) mindset, including we Americans. So, yeah, I'd have to agree with Dr. Hallowell that epochal changes have to be ahead. And the grim reality, when you look at nature's trial and error engine of "creative destruction," is that epochal changes leave a lot of living entities behind. The first major casualty of all this has been in the area of competent political policymaking and decisionmaking: generally speaking, our leaders—worldwide—are clueless.

Hallowell's book can be ordered here: "CrazyBusy”. The LA Times piece is here: "Emerging Nations Powering Global Economic Boom”

Posted on May 15, 2006

John Muir Would Have Said It Differently, But I Think He'd Agree Were He Alive Today: I'd Rather Take My Cues from the Amazing Workings of DNA, the Latest Cosmological Discoveries or Insights on How the Brain Functions Than on the Most Brilliantly and Beautifully Inventive Suppositions About How to Get the Most Good from Who I Am

When I bump up against excessive ideological zeal, particular among theorists purporting to tell me how they want to change me to better fit their special vision of how the world ought to work, I once again take solace and insight from naturalist John Muir’s experience with Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In May, 1871, Emerson came west with a sophisticated entourage to visit Muir’s beloved Yosemite. Muir thought the encounter with such sheer beauty and scope would profoundly impact the group, especially the great creative talent who was its cynosure. But Muir soon learned that the visitors hardly even noticed nature. “I felt lonely, so sure had I been that Emerson of all men would be the quickest to see the mountains and sing them,” he later confided.

Pouring salt in Muir’s wounded psyche, Emerson invited him to come east to meet “better people.”

Repeatedly, I’m astonished at how easy it is for so many to look completely past the extraordinary profundity, complexity and creativity of the world we all live in as they hurry to sell some technique leading to blissful oblivion or theology promising an escape to eternal life or iron-clad outer mental/emotional/spiritual/(whatever) garment to wear as protection against almost the whole of their own nature. On this point, at least, I agree with Muir and with, of all people, Ayn Rand. Rand said you needed to study the Emersons and other philosophers of impact on the thinking of humankind if, for no other reason, so you can protect yourself from their machinations.

Muir didn’t want to be protected from what he learned from nature. I don’t either. In my opinion, experience and observation, this is pretty much where it all starts and ends, with any hope of definiteness and definition. Everything else is pretty much one brain's supposition, based on at best a few thousand years of "prep" work. Nature has been at the task of doing something with the chaos it finds much, much longer. Best we read and puzzle out its book on how to make sense of our extraordinary situation before we put a lot of stock in the formulations we find in our own books.

Can't you just see Emerson losing interest in such comments and deciding he needs to invite me to "come east and meet some better people"?

Posted on May 13, 2006

Six Years Ago I Wrote About Where Mr. Bush Clocked Out on the Timepiece of Presidential Candidates. I Continue to Think It Was a Timely Reading.

Goofing around the other day in the jazillion or so bytes of information stored on my hard drive, I came across an item I wrote as an op-end piece in the fall of 2000, during the U.S. presidential election run-up. Well, it was intended to be an op-ed piece. As it turned out, it was a stop-ed piece, because it ended up unpublished.

Re-reading the effort six years later, I think it not half-bad. No, actually, I think it rather good. Prescient, in fact.

I titled my piece “A Campaign Clockworks: How the Candidates’ Thinking Differs." If it has any value six years later, it is to remind us that the policy and performance disasters that are threatening to drop Mr. Bush’s approval rates in the polls into the 20s shouldn’t at all be surprising. Anyone who was paying attention to how the man thinks could, from the start, see the genuine likelihood for real trouble. The point I was making was that in electing presidents, American voters are well-advised to pay attention to how their candidates think, no matter what they say. My observations again, six years later:

You need eyes wide shut to not realize that this American presidential race of 2000 has turned into an all-consuming 24/7 obsessional kind of circus. Or not to see that turning politics into total, continuous theater badly damages our ability to make informed judgments. How can we possibly predict what candidates will do if elected versus what they say they will do while campaigning?

We suggest making eyes-wide-open assessments of their thinking patterns and skills. Because the lifelong pattern of how a person thinks is the one thing that can help you make sense of the spin-doctors’ sound bites and half-factoids, of the real values and intents that lay hidden underneath the hyperbole, rhetoric and spin.

Let’s think of a clock face. And let’s start at 12 o’clock high—with Bill Clinton.

The kind of thinking found at 12 o’clock is, for most of us, strangely visionary and oddly disquieting in ways we don’t fully understand. When you get a complex leader who thinks at 12 o’clock—outside the box—they always make it appear that traditional values are crumbling.

There is a mountain of evidence that thinking at 12 o’clock invariably breeds a special kind of self-confidence and arrogance. And so in significant ways, “Slick Willie” has been the dominant personality of this campaign even though he’s not running. For many Americans, Clinton’s sordid extramarital behavior stands as Exhibit No 1 that the nation’s deepest values are under siege.

Since neither George W. Bush nor Al Gore thinks at 12 o’clock, no matter who is elected, that in itself will provide traditional values with a certain surcease from the pounding of the past eight years.

On the thinking clock face, George Bush is almost a mirror opposite to Mr. Clinton. For much of his life, Mr. Bush has been thinking at 6 o’clock, not 12. At age 12, in the lobby of the Nonantum Hotel in Kennebunkport, he was swearing and smoking cigarettes and outrageously chatting up the ladies like they were barmaids. At the Bush family Christmas 1972, a short time before he left for Harvard Business School, he invited his dad to go mano a mano when upbraided for rowdiness. And many was the time in his father’s election campaign in 1987 when he walked into meetings bearing a paper cup as spittoon, totally oblivious to appearances.

At 6 o’clock, this isn’t arrogance so much as impulsiveness, unpretentiousness and naiveté. At 6 o'clock you live in the moment.

Today, we believe Bush spends most of his time at about 7:30, not 6. (It is possible to migrate on the thinking clock face.) At 7:30, there is a passion to push events rather than to ride impulsively along with them. To be seen as decisive, quick-reacting, risk-taking. As being an unpredictable opponent and a consummate brinkmanship player—just the sort, you might say, who would try and score points against his opponent by challenging precedent and the rules, such as those set by the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates. At 7:30, you often do what you do calculatedly but you always do it to win.

At 7:30, then, your thinking equips you to make things happen. You come to recognize, as the former President Bush has observed of his son, the candidate, “how to give a little to get a lot.” If you are good at thinking here, you can develop, as George W. Bush has, a disarming charm to go with a sometimes ill-advised and surprising insouciance simply because you are so candid and action-oriented.

7:30 is not a complicated place to think, so we know that Al Gore doesn’t think there. Gore is a complicated man, according to Presidential scholar Richard Neustadt. Gore’s ex-Harvard professor suggests that his former pupil is perhaps outshone only by Theodore Roosevelt when his keen mind is compared to keen-minded presidents of the past century.

Our analysis suggests Gore thinks at about 10:30, where the passion is not so much to do or to believe but to know—and in the knowing to feel that you are genuinely and completely in control.

Thinking at 10:30 has caused Gore no little anguish in his life. He agonized after his return from the war about the meaning of Vietnam. He agonized about his father’s Senatorial campaign defeat. He has agonized about “Earth in the Balance” (the title of his book). For a time this kind of thinking looked like it might sink his campaign altogether, because of the constant agonizing desire to reinvent it.

At 10:30 you don’t do anything—even kiss your wife—haphazardly. You analyze your choices dispassionately. You agonize about your options, even with reporters, even when you know you are on the record. You go searching in your family history for precisely the right anecdote so you can show your distracters that you do, too, understand the importance of a well-turned story in communicating who you are to the public.

When you reinvent yourself at 10:30, it takes so long and is so obvious, everybody eventually notices. It is enough to make you go searching elsewhere on the dial for a running mate.

Mr. Gore also needed a vaccination against the out-of-the-box proclivities of Mr. Clinton, and with much deliberation and perhaps because his oldest daughter told him to, he went to 4:30 or so and found Mr. Lieberman. In the Senator’s neck of the thinking clock woods, conventional morality is highly prized, and he had said so in one of the Senate’s most memorable speeches ever, one condemning Mr. Clinton’s 12 o’clock shortcomings. There was no need for Joe Lieberman to reinvent himself. A Jewish politician pioneering on a national ticket, son of a bakery truck driver, a former Mississippi Freedom Rider, a very conventionally moral man, he is perfect just the way he is.

For his ticket, Mr. Bush, who has run only Texas and some have said not all that well, desperately needed the look of gravitas. Calculatedly and perhaps because his daddy told him to, he went to 9 o’clock or a little past and found Dick Cheney. At 9 o’clock, people are known as good commanders of tasks, particularly complex ones. Cheney had a reputation as a no-nonsense master of getting complicated things done, especially concerning foreign affairs, military issues and the workings of Congress. Of course, no-nonsense, performance-minded thinkers aren’t always attuned closely to nuances, so intent are they on getting the results they seek. This almost assured that there would be some rocky moments for the Bush ticket when the press took a closer look at issues (as it has turned out) like Cheney’s history of voting, both in Congress and at the ballot box, and his charitable donations.

So what does the thinking clock face suggest about the realities of this election?

It is immediately apparent that the two Democratic candidates’ thinking and core values take in a much broader spectrum of the clock face than their opponents’ thinking and values.

It is also clear that the Republican candidates are both closely identified with the part of the clock face where Gore and Lieberman are weakest. And that they themselves are weakest on the parts of the clock face where Lieberman’s thinking reigns supreme.

So whichever ticket wins, the clock face demolishes the idea there is little difference between the two tickets or the individuals running on them. And it cleans the clock of the idea that no matter who wins, it will make little difference in how they govern. The fact is that the "issues" are not really the issue. The real issue is how the candidates think.

This time around, voters have some very clear choices if they will but take a look at the clock face and see what time it is for the chief personalities on the ballot.

The thinking clock isn’t easily fooled. It's hardwired into the candidates’ natures, and all the spin in the world can't change that.

(Those of my readers who are familiar with the thinking skills models developed at Brain Technologies will probably realize that this is the Asset Report® model, superimposed on a clock face. For anyone curious, additional details are here: " Asset Report: The Book of You” But we have been warned against ignoring how our politicians think at least since Graham Wallas's seminal work, "Human Nature in Politics," first published in 1908. For a copy of that, go here: "Human Nature in Politics.”

Posted on May 09, 2006

A Report from Dolphin-Shark-Carp Waters in Australia: What Can Happen When an Organization Takes the Model to Heart...And to Lunch on Fridays!

A reader who is on the faculty at a “regional Australia university” writes to tell us about the use of Brain Technologies’ dolphin-shark-carp model of thinking systems in leadership training and other change activities. He has asked for anonymity because things are “a little political at the moment.”

I read your blog with interest and must tell you that [we] are also using the dolphin as a symbol of assertive and positive behavior. It's been a hard slog though as the number and position of sharks in our organisation is significant. That said, it has dramatically shaped smaller teams within the organisation and started to create a culture that revolves more around how be interact with one another. We hear in our corridors now, ‘Mate, I think you're being a bit sharky, how about we look at this differently?' or ‘Come on, stop carping, let's come up with some ideas and solutions to change things.’ It is slowly helping move us from a reactive, stressful organisation to one that is proactive, open to ideas and able to cope with change.

It is however a constant struggle, for the generational change required is immense. This organisation has traditionally rewarded sharks in the mistaken belief they get things done. It's that old business adage, 'I don't care, just do what I say,' regardless of the issues at hand. So there is a struggle between the dolphin change agents and the sharks, who are threatened by change and wish to retain the status quo. After all that is all they know and own their success to.

Nevertheless, we are trying and in our division, Information Technology Services, we have a leadership program that all staff must participant in. The 200-odd staff in our division all know that they should be dolphins, some units are even have a Carp Blanche Friday Lunch ...purpose: if you got anything negative to say that's the time to do it. It's a fun way to get rid of the stress of the week and move on to being a dolphin again. It's also a great laugh.

We are dominated by sharks in this organisation and that remains an issue. Strangely, a shark is one of the big supporters of the scheme due to the need to improve morale as a core work requirement.

He sees it as a win for him, but has become frustrated because the culture it has generated has worked against him. We have linked this into team development, and so its success is better measured in regard to how staff work in teams and how they approach tasks as a team. It is linked with other concepts such as building high performing teams, leadership, personal development, creating a learning organisation and assertive behavior. We started this whole exercise as a means to allow staff to cope with major change (both structural and process) within the division and to improve our ability to work within small and large team environments including, cross functional group communication.

The upshot is that management have in some ways created a beast they can't control and are having some difficulty coming to terms with the change. Staff are forming what we call bubbles of leadership, the principle being that as the culture boils the bubbles rise to the top. Dophins, carps and sharks make up an important part of the process. We push dolphin-like behaviors, gang up on sharks and manage/eat carps. It has had some interesting side affects. People are finding their voice, they are questioning and being proactive with their input. People are also questioning what type of organisation we want to work in and to a large extent many are starting to feel like they must move on to create the culture they believe in elsewhere. The pressure for change began from the top but is now being facilitated from the bottom.

It is by no means perfect and is currently in a state of flux. We are yet to move to a new beginning and resistance is starting to come from above. Conversely, individuals who have suppressed real leadership ability are asserting themselves and moving on or up.

My role: I was selected with two others from internal staff to take on a training role within the organisation. One, to allow us to perpetuate the ideas and concepts from an internal perceptive and, two, to cut the cost of external training. We do this for no extra pay, but because we believe that we can make a positive contribution to the organisation and make it a great place to work. Along with that, I find it personally rewarding, and I keep learning everyday as a result.

It's all about leadership as an individual. Being accountable for your future and the future of those around you. Knowing that your actions and behavior make a difference everyday not just the nuts and bolts of your work, but what you think, how you think what you say, and how you say it. To be honest we have created and achieved far more innovative and constructive solutions as a result. Everybody knows what a dolphin, carp and shark is; it's become a touchstone to be assertive about behaviors and expectations.

The University sees what we do as tree-hugging and so we are fighting to keep the momentum up. The sharks are circling and they are extremely powerful and large. The end result will be we win and help them win by improving the environment and kick goals, or we leave and start afresh somewhere else. Sometimes a dolphin needs to cut their losses and move to warmer waters.

In broader sense, the University also has a highly successful leadership program which widely promotes Dolphin Thinking throughout the organisation, among other things. It's amazing how this program has affected people, and helped them feel empowered about their jobs, in some cases inspiring them to move forward with their lives. These people tend to become a bit of a beacon within their areas. A good example is a women I did the program with who has since left to become a script writer, turning her yearning into her profession.

Copies of Paul Kordis’s and my dolphin book, are available here: " Strategy of the Dolphin®: Scoring a Win in a Chaotic World ” or " Strategy of the Dolphin®: Scoring a Win in a Chaotic World ”

Posted on May 01, 2006