Communication Basics: The Tortoise and the Hare Story isn't True Even if Fictional

Listen to these phrases:

     let's rest for a second

     let's sprint for a minute

     let's run for an hour

     let's walk for today

Please note the combination of speed variations with the variety of time frames.  They vary accordingly.  So which is better resting or walking?  The question seems a little crazy doesn't it, because in context neither is better than the other.  But all four paces or speeds are necessary.  My point is that you need to be able to have different speeds to do well.  

What is missing in so many discussions of big topics like manic-depression is the basics.  We too often don't start there, but at the pinnacle of what we know and sufficiently complicate it so that no one knows what we are really saying.  So let's not begin first with the meaning of manic-depression. Let's start with some more basic questions than even those presented above.

Let's start out with a first question you could ask grade school children.  It is: 

Which is better fast or slow?

I can hear the children shouting out: Fast!  

Let's ask a second question, but this time of children who are older like junior highers.  It is:

Is it better to vary your speed or to always be at the same speed?  

I can hear the students shouting: Vary!

Finally, let's ask some high schools to put this altogether.  Which is better fast and steady, fast and variable, slow and steady, or slow and variable?  

I believe they would combine fast and variable together and regard that combination as the best.  The thing that I think is overlooked is what I learned in track.  It is the person who gets to the finish line first who wins, not the person who exceeded their body's speed limits for the full distance.  The body and the mind have limitations on them depending on the distance to be traveled.  It is about the destination first and the time allowed second.  It is about our matching pace third.  

A distance runner is a lot like a sprinter - both are going their fastest to get to a destination.  The difference is that they are able to run or sprint in a different gear than the other.  They establish a comfortable winning pace for their race.  Even sprinters vary how they run a 100 meter, 200 meter, and a 400 meter race.  They are not the same  in terms of which gear you use to run that respective race.  But all are at your fastest possible pace, if you desire to win.  

That is more easily seen in the case of distance runners - the pace is critical to winning the race - to getting to the finish line first.  The goal is not to be the fastest - then you would run the same speed as a sprinter and crash and burn - the goal is to be the first to the finish line.  So fast here is relative to the distance and the time allowed.  Fast varies.  

We don't allow a sprinter to run the 100 in 2 minutes.  We also don't expect the miler to run the mile in 2 minutes.  Yet both racers can win their respective races with faster paces and shorter times than others in their same race.  That is why I think the rule is fast and variable.   I agree with my high school track teammates.  

The story of the Tortoise and the Hare is very distorting of the honest truth.  The reality is that the hare would have won had he had a warning system to resume his run following his rest periods.  The other thing is that the race distance favored the tortoise.

The problem is that this story places in some minds the idea that slow and steady is favorable.  I don't think it is.  The goal in track is to run as fast as you can within your capacity.  It is not to go as slow as you can.  You are not running so as to win the race, when you run slow.  That does not mean it can't be a variance of fast that helps the most and is the healthiest.  

Manic depression comes from too fast BUT not from fast.  Likewise procrastination comes from too slow or not fast enough.  We must avoid both traps in order to measure up to what every high school student knows - all they have to do is walk to a friendly track meet.  I sure wish more people did!  We would have more people practicing fast and variable.  Run your pace to the race and rest, sprint, run, or walk your way to victory over manic-depression or procrastination-regret!

Sincerely,

Jon

Communication Basics: When Excess Means Too Much of a Good Thing

There are many good things that can be destroyed by excess.  An apple is a good thing, but a diet of only apples is not.  Protein is a good thing, but just hamburgers at McDonald's for one's entire diet is not!  You get the point.  Well, I want you to get to point about a set of excesses in the case of mental health and not just physical health.

My book on mental health, Mental Health for Everyone, deals a lot with excesses and how to beat the problem of excess. It deals with it through the principle of intervals.  One gets bigger, faster, stronger, and smarter little by little, moment by moment, step by step, and bit by bit.  The attainments that are every child's dream - to become bigger, faster, stronger, and smarter, don't occur overnight except in fairy tales but they can begin that night.  So my approach in this piece will be to get at the basics of defeating excesses!

Let's bulldoze them down together, shall we?   There are four major sets of excesses.  They are:

1) expert excess or amateur excess

2) manic depression excess or procrastination-sleep excess

3) easy street excess or difficulty street excess

4) know everything excess and know nothing excess

You probably have not heard of some of these under these names, but I would guess everyone has experienced these excesses whether it be at school, at work, at play, or at a religious gathering.

Let's deal with each one, one at a time, starting with the first one.  As I deal with each I will be more specific about each generalized grouping.


Expert excess I call "expertitis".  It has a close cousin, a fellow excess, called "amateuritis".  They both fail to lift a light weight more than previous lifts that is necessary to get bigger.  Excess expertise fastens too heavy a load on people's backs.  Excess amateurism fastens too light of a load on people's backs.  They both look foolish, yet day after day the king doesn't realize he's wearing no clothes!  We want people's minds to grow into a greater understanding - it is just that it has to happen little by light to remain light so that people reach a bigger understanding.  The excesses make understanding smaller.  We need to change this in terms of quantity and quality from both excesses.  

Manic-depression excess is what it sounds like.  It is both too high and too low.  It goes outside actual human limitations.  It has a close cousin, a fellow excess, called procrastination-slowness.  The latter pair is my own creation.  Isn't it ironic that on the internet I can plenty of articles on manic-depression and on bipolar that are sicknesses, but I could not find an article on what is its healthy opposite nor on its close cousin of excess?  I had to go to other sources than psychology for a serious concern about being a procrastinator or being too slow - a slow poke.  You find this in the business world primarily. This is interesting because the success of high technology has led us into a steady diet of fast and steady.  Also interesting is that a child's fairy tale has taken hold in psychological circles.  It is part of Aesop's fables and it is called, The Tortoise and the Hare.  This story's fabled moral is a steady diet of "slow and steady wins the race".  Not according to the internet and the rest of technology!  The excesses of both stories - Aesop's and the internet's - are woven into too much of our thinking.  We are people that should be fast and variable - able to rest, sprint, run, or walk depending on the distance and time.  We aren't doing this!  We need to break free in terms of placement and timing from both excesses.


Easy excess can be called easy street.  Difficult excess, its close cousin, can be called difficult street. When it comes to increments it should be easy, but this should not lead to an avoidance of difficulty.  Eventually in our jobs over time, we can handle more difficult processes than we could at first.  If we try to master everything in the beginning, it all becomes difficult and then some even quit.  In other cases, employees can be with a company for years and never master the harder parts of a job.  It should be that we are moving from easy to easy step by step, but not all in one step and not with the end goal that we cannot master hard things.  The greats make the difficult look easy.  Look at your greatest musical artists and at your best athletes - they make even the difficult look easy - so it is both and not excess!  We need to free ourselves from the popular approaches to methods and purposes where we too one day can make the difficult look easy.


The I know everything mentality and its close cousin, I know nothing mentality are both dangerous.  We have got people who run around claiming to know what they don't know.  I see this a lot with predictions of the future. Some things you can know about tomorrow given that certain conditions remain constant, but you don't know that they necessarily will.  There are people who claim to know the end of the earth.  I thought we we human beings who don't know everything?  Having said that though, we also like to play at knowing nothing.  Really?  You really don't know.  Some of this play borders on pathetic.  If we've had teachers, we ought to know some things as do others, we ought to know things others don't, we ought to not know things others do know, and there ought to be things neither person knows; but this last category is only one of four - not the whole deal.  We need to be learning new things in terms of things and kinds and not just be stuck with two old bad cousins.


It is time to close up this discussion.  The point in all of it is to be healthy by avoiding excess.  This article for example can only be so long.  We need to avoid the excesses of experts and amateurs and step up our understanding little by little.  We need to avoid the excesses of the Manic -Depression and the Procrastination-Slow and step up our inspiring moment by moment.  We need to avoid the excesses of Easy Street and Difficult Street (it might be also called Baker Street with the difficult hero, Sherlock Holmes, in room 212B).  We also need to avoid the excesses of know-it-all and know-it-not at all and develop the captivating bit by bit  If you avoid the communication of this article, then please be sure it is not because of one of these excesses.  Improve your ability to listen and then speak  - to communicate - through excess avoidance.  We need to change excesses, break from excesses, free ourselves from excesses, and discover some new things.    Remember too many apples is not a good thing for your diet.  Your mind has a healthy diet too!  Get mental health and then get happy!


Sincerely,

Jon

Communications Basics 101: A Communicators Job is Never Done on a Higher Level

While I have completed a book and then had it published too, it does not mean my communication is over.  In one sense it is, the fundamentals in it really are done.  What remains is more of each of those fundamentals - their development.  My book is titled, Mental Health for Everyone,

One of the chapters describing schooling is the key to making a major dent in the problem of manic-depression and the other extreme of putting people to sleep.  My sample or example in that chapter comes from the sport of track.

Since writing the book, I think the key point using track is solid, but I should have developed my approach in contrast two approaches.  There are essentially three approaches to the mind's handling of relationships.  They are:

fast and steady
fast and variable
slow and steady.

I should have used the story of what I will call my reformed school one mile race.  In high school, I ran a race against two runners from a reformed school.  One was fast and steady and the other was slow and steady.  I was the one who was fast and variable.

The fast and steady runner took off in the race like it was a 400 meter or 440 yard race.  He collapsed after a couple of laps.  I mean he literally collapsed onto the track.

His teammate on the other hand ran steadily slow until he realized it was the last lap.  Then he at the last moment took off in an effort to catch me.

Personally, I was lulled into running too slow myself by his approach to the race and by his activities leading up to the race.  I call it the zombie effect.  Until he took off after his procrastination in the race I had been running a too relaxed pace myself.  Fortunately, a teammate let me know I should get going since the guy was coming up on my fast.

I took off harder myself with 300 meters or 330 yards to go.  I in the end held him off since I had run fast, but variably based on my distance.

In this race, I knew I had to vary my pace from what I would do for 400 meters.  That way I did not collapse.  But I also knew to run fast still, since too slow of a pace could also lose the race.  That is what happened to the second runner.

In the United States we have young people especially who are trapped by a world that is only fast and steady and eventually collapses - too often in the form of suicide or some form of breakdown.  We also have many who procrastinate until the race is lost and it is too late to win the prize.

I could further the ideas in  my book by developing this story.  So I am doing it now.  This will likely go into a second edition, if I am fast enough to get that opportunity.

The good thing is that I finished my book - I did not collapse and not finish.  Likewise, I didn't drag it out until the last gasp and end up getting it out too late - I still have things left over to improve next time.  I didn't engage in fruitless procrastination.

My book titled, Mental Health for Everyone, is available through Amazon and through Barnes and Noble.  To get to my book simply type in my full name or the full title or both.  You will find it.

If you want a bit of a preview beyond that found at Amazon.com, then you can go to youtube and watch the following (you might have to copy and paste this to your browser):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC5XDFly3GA



Have fun!  Remember, it is fast and variable wins the race.  Go get 'em and let's win this race!



Sincerely,

Jon Westlund