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ARTICLES
Curing Message Overload E-tools have swarmed in without rules or etiquette for effective use. Let's create some. By Joe Robinson We are said to be a nation of laws, but any desk jockey knows that's an illusion. All order, if not liberty itself, ends where the E-tools begin. Unbounded electronic communications have turned civil society into an anarchic, free-fire zone of ceaseless incoming, stealing our time and productivity. The volume of electronic messaging keeps mounting-without rules, limits, or traffic lights. The average person gets 42 E-mails a day. Not surprisingly, a survey by Day-Timers found that instant communications technology is making it harder, not easier, to get things done. The number of people who feel very productive has fallen from 83% in 1994 to just 51% today. It's hard to find optimal performance in a 24/7 distraction derby. One Microsoft study found that it took workers 15 minutes to get mental focus back after answering an E-mail. In the spirit of Madison and Jefferson, it's time to reclaim liberty, not to mention productivity, with some boundary setting. Since the rules are nonexistent, we're not breaking any, only bad habits that have been allowed to pile up in a vacuum of E-discipline. It's time to redraw the vanished line between work and home, and between legitimate office communications and compulsive junk with an E-Tool Bill of Rights: (See left column of this page) Most of the E-chaos today is enabled by our limitless need to be wanted. The E-Tool Bill of Rights helps do what the Founding Fathers knew we had to--save us from ourselves. (c) 2006 Joe Robinson, published in Fast Company magazine It's Now or Never There's no takeoff without risk, your personal travel agent. By Joe Robinson Wire walking is distinctly absent from my life list of things to do on this planet. For one, ballet slippers don't really work for me. But mainly, there are just too many land routes out there to be strolling in midair. Yet I'm fascinated by people who do it, and I envy their courage. Frenchman Philippe Petit does it probably more outrageously than anybody. I caught him on TV wobbling about 300 feet above a French valley. No net. The wind was up, and his clothes were flapping like a flag. I flashed on footage of the great karl Wallenda being blown off balance to his death while doing a rooftop-to-rooftop walk in 1978. Petit had a huge distance to cover for wire walking, about 800 feet. He inched his way carefully to the center of the cable, strung between a hilltop castle and a cliff on the other side. And sat down. Don't stop, I thought. Keep going. He proceeds to execute a backward somersault, all the while somehow holding on to his balancing pole. Then he got up, did some gymnastics-style arm flourishes for good measure, and calmly walked the rest of the wire. Philippe Petit has to be one of the ultimate risk-takers. Except he doesn't think so. His job isn't risky, he says, because he's "a madman for details." He prepares each of his walks so thoroughly that there's no risk left. It's the same for Chris Davenport, an extreme skiing champ whose business is skiing down sections of summits that are barely climbable. Along the way, he estimates he's been caught in three avalanches, and he shattered his knee on a wipeout in New Zealand. "Many people probably see what I do as very risky," he concedes, "but since these are things I do all the time and that I love to do and feel comfortable at, I don't necessarily see it as such." Risk, it appears, is relative. What's hair-raising for you or I is not for Petit or Davenport. Things you or I do may be hair-raising for someone else, even Petit, who was afraid to swim until he was in his 30s. Another thing we learn from risk-takers is that risk tends to be temporary, manageable, when challenged. What was once unthinkable behavior, like wire walking or sliding down summits, with preparation and experience becomes knowable and routine. When you see how arbitrary and pliable risk is and how it's altered or debunked with action, it's clear we could be risking more often. The reason we don't has something to do with that speedway pulse and timpani ticker that crank up when it's time to put ourselves on the line. Risk makes us sweat because we have absolutely no assurance that our bid to propose a new project, ask someone out or hang glide is going to work out. We stand exposed and vulnerable at the edge of the great unknown, stomach in pretzel formation. You'd think we'd be used to it by now. "There is not a single human behavior that is characterized by total certainty of outcome. Not a single one," points out Dr. Gerald Wilde, a risk expert at Queen's University in Toronto and author of "Target Risk." "You can't go to a restaurant and be absolutely sure you won't get food poisoning. You can't close your eyes and be sure sleep will come. You can't meet a woman and be sure that this will be the greatest encounter of your life. There is always a considerable amount of uncertainty. So, in a sense, all behavior is risk-taking behavior. The only way to avoid risk is to be dead." A healthier alternative is to find a way to live with risk, since we don't leave home without it. It's our personal travel agent. How we assess risk determines how limiting, or unlimited, our journey will be. Travel is a great way to hone risk-taking skills because it forces us out of the pocket of the warm and fuzzy into a daily unknown. We have to take more chances. This allows us to extend beyond presumed limits of personality or endurance and shatter blocks that keep us from risking--inertia, embarrassment, obsession with future security. We live for the new data coming at us today, and our brains like it that way, since our neurons are programmed to seek out novelty. "To me, it's the time when I feel the most alive," says paddler, adventurer and Telluride Film Festival director Arlene Burns. "It's like risk is some kind of connection to vitality. If you don't take risks, you're basically living in a bubble." Risk is how we strive to thrive, how we pay off curiosity, the only way we can ever learn anything. Without it, there are no world to conquer, no challenge. No dreams achieved. But it doesn't come easy. There's turbulence with takeoff, blisters to bear up the switchbacks of success. Risk has a price, but it's less than the cost of not risking: kind of living. Stagnation. Good risk-takers need to be good risk calculators, but most of us aren't. The odds of dying in a plane crash in a given year are 1 in 300,000. But there are many more sweaty palms in the friendly skies than there are on the unfriendly roads, where the odds of buying it in a car accident are 1 in 4,000. Skiing is 300 percent to 400 percent more fatal than flying. What we think is risky often isn't, because our logic is clouded by fear: fear of heights, rejection, public speaking (the number one fear of Americans, topping even death). None of these fears comes rationally, or naturally. "We're born with just one fear," notes Myrna Loy Ashby, a psychologist in Dallas, Texas. "All the research tells us we are born with the fear of falling, and everything else is learned." There's a lot to unlearn: things like "You can't. You haven't done it before. You won't do it right. It's not original enough." What makes risk risky is the potential of loss--of self-esteem, shirt--and behind it all grins the grand-daddy of risk roadblocks, the great unspeakable: failure. It lurks in the shadows like a mad slasher, ready to hack exposed egos to shreds with a wrong move. Or so we think. The lessons of risk-takers, though, tell us something quite different. The secret of successful people is: They fail. Henry Ford's first two car companies failed. He tried again; the rest is history. High jumper Dick Fosbury failed as a conventional straddle high jumper; he tried a new style and flopped his way to a gold medal. It took Rowland Macy seven times to get his retail store right. Behind most success you'll find failure, and people who view setbacks not as the end but as an invitation to another approach. It's like the scientific method: You only find out what works by finding out what doesn't. What works is something stronger than fear: motivation. "Desire can override fear in a heartbeat, if it's strong enough," states Ashby. The right incentive short-circuits your security systems. You have to find your trigger--pride, the passion to live what you love, curiosity, growth, exploration. Regret is a particularly good incentive, and a clever one, countering a present fear with a worse future one. I've talked to many risk-takers over the years on this topic, and I've found it to be unanimous: We don't regret the risks we take, only the ones we don't. It"s been said that the fear of death is really more a fear of not having lived, the ultimate regret if we don't listen to the spark of risk. Taking chances is something we do easily on the road, changing into new personalities, venturing onto suspect aircraft, forging through hazardous backstreets or menus. Travel moves us past risk inhibitors like future fixation. The people least likely to take risks, says Wilde, are those who "have a high expectation of the future and a high perception of the value of future time." When we travel, we learn that today is the play, not the rehearsal, and tomorrow's cut out of the action. Mostly, though, travel teaches us to trust our gut, the main ingredient in risk-taking, and let intuition steer us through the fog of uncertainty. Burns, a stunt double for Meryl Streep on "The River Wild," has used her sixth sense to guide her through many hazards on the paddling and remote adventuring trail. "There's an intuitive force that lets me know if this is okay to do," she explains. Risk-taking isn't a Vegas trip; it's not a gamble at all. In gambling, you have no influence over the outcome. Risk-takers, though, feel they have control over the outcome; it's a calculated risk that brings homework and skills to bear. "It's sort of an evolution," says extreme skier Davenport. "You start doing it on a certain level and just keep building on it, betting better and better, and then all of a sudden you're doing something that somebody else considers risky." The perception is that risk-takers are fearless, that they bull forward without being wracked by the knee-knocking apprehension of the rest of us mortals. But they're not immune to butterflies before a steep slope or big rapid. They just act despite the fear. Fear isn't necessarily a bad thing; it's how we respond to it. No Himalayan expedition wants a fearless member on board making reckless, potentially fatal decision. The challenge is to acknowledge the fear without being immobilized by it, and then to push on past the anxiety and ambiguities, letting your gut, not the alarmist opinions of others, make the final call. And when you act, notes Ashby, "You pull together creativity and empowerment and the very sense of who you are. And it doesn't matter if you're successful or not. Just the fact that you've decided to take the risk makes all the difference. It contains a life in that one decision." In an old "Star Trek" episode the aliens of the week are clairvoyants, who know everything that's going to happen next. They're incredulous at these clueless humans, flying blindly into the future. Who could blame them? It is rather audacious. But then, that's the adventure. Not knowing until we try. (c) 1998 Joe Robinson Club Med on CrackBerry No rest, or impulse control, for the weary By Joe Robinson JONATHAN JAFFE NEEDED a library card. ASAP. It was the only thing that could save him from a fate worse than an IRS audit: vacation without an Internet connection. Trapped at a Club Med near West Palm Beach, Fla., cut off from the universe as he knew it - his job - he was near meltdown. When the librarian told him that he had to have a card to plug in, and be a resident to get a card, fight-or-flight chemicals kicked in. "Well, we just put a bid down on this house in the neighborhood," he said. Thus began a twice-daily, 20-minute run from the resort to the library. "I had to get on the Internet and check my e-mails," said Jaffe, who heads a public relations firm in New Jersey. Had the librarian been trained to recognize the signs, she would have spotted the symptoms of Connection Addiction Syndrome, a compulsion that's turning tranquil lakes and wooded glens into field offices. A Boston College study found that 32% of employees and 58% of managers worked on "vacation." Many were wired for business on their time off via assorted laptops, cellphones and, most ominously, BlackBerrys. The e-mail pager's street handle - CrackBerry - testifies to the dynamic at work here. Some have found the urge to message so overwhelming that there is a special glove to protect injured CrackBerry thumbs, and others seek treatment for uncontrollable sending and receiving at clinics normally reserved for drug detox, according to the Times of London. Used obsessively, the devices become a kind of digital meth, feeding the high that comes from vanquishing the anarchic forces of nonproductivity. When you are programmed to believe that all value in life comes from production, stepping away from that shuts off the adrenaline that so many live to buzz on. "When they stop working, they get anxious, depressed," says Gail Bates, a Los Altos, Calif., psychologist who works with burnout cases in the Silicon Valley. The impulse behind Connection Addiction is the fear of missing out on something, of being out of the almighty loop. Social animals that we are, we're suckers for attention. The dinging, buzzing and bonging of e-stowaways are sounds that we are needed, wanted, connected - to a colleague's hare-brained marketing scheme, projects due when we get back, the latest pitch for Cialis and other matters that could wait a week or two. All of this fuels a growing disconnection with our real lives. In the frenzy to be where we're not, what winds up missing is us - from our own vacation, the one shot we have at being who we really are. The recuperative benefits of holidays are well-documented: They reduce the risk of heart disease, cure burnout, improve mood. To get all that, however, you actually have to be there, in mind as well as body, distanced from the source of stressors and to-do lists. A real vacation is about input - the experience of living - not output. To kick the e-contact habit, we need to set boundaries. Pagers, beepers, laptops and e-mail-checking devices should be impounded by a neighbor for safekeeping until your return. Book your trip well in advance, and let everyone know you will be sublimely out of reach. (c) 2005 Joe Robinson, published in the Los Angeles Times Temple Safari A Burmese Steeple Chase By Joe Robinson My body was already a waterfall, and it was only 10:15 a.m. in the oven of Bagan, former imperial capital of Myanmar. Standing on the pedals of my rented one-speed girl's bike with a leopard-print seat, I dripped up an incline, passed a couple of bullocks on death's door pulling an ancient wooden cart and then swerved off the asphalt into sand as an air-conditioned bus filled with grinning foreign tourists blew by. The backdraft stirred up a storm of dry-season dust, and as it settled, I could make out a surreal spectacle from the top of the rise: a sea of otherworldly steeples dancing in the heat waves -- some conical, others topped with doughnut-shaped rings, some with glinting golden umbrellas, some sculpted into immense bells. Despite the heat, it was not a mirage. The sci-fi skyline is the legacy of a mysterious building boom that turned this central Burmese savanna astride the Irrawaddy River into one of Asia's most sprawling but least-known extravaganzas of religious architecture. Angkor Wat, the famed Cambodian monument that has a shared Hindu and Buddhist past, contains 200 temples. Bagan, formerly known as Pagan, boasts 2,217 Buddhist temples and monuments, and once had more than 4,000 sites. Strewn across a couple of dozen square miles, this forest of brick and stone towers was triggered by a templemania that reigned from the 11th to 13th centuries, when Bagan was the capital of the Burmese empire. Sacred edifices went up by the hundreds, housing giant Buddhas and wall and ceiling murals the likes of which would not be seen until the Sistine Chapel. I rode through the maze of devotion, hoping to understand the compulsion behind the building spree. On my journey, I would also encounter more recent construction, part of a controversial restoration campaign by the military government of Myanmar, known as Burma until the regime renamed it in 1989. The rehab is designed to fuel tourism, particularly from China. UNESCO and archaeological experts have denounced the government's rebuilding of ancient sites, and the construction of a mammoth 197-foot viewing tower that has been open for two years and an upscale resort in the middle of Bagan's antiquities. Not that Myanmar's State Peace and Development Council -- the latest incarnation of a junta that has sealed the nation off from the rest of the world for the last 44 years -- is going to lose sleep over some old bricks. Although a world pariah for its gulag of political prisoners, bloody campaigns against ethnic minorities, suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators in 1988, and for keeping Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, elected president of the nation, under house arrest on and off since 1989, the regime isn't deterred by public censure. Or boycotts. International trade sanctions and a tourist boycott designed to restore democracy have kept Western products and many travelers out of Myanmar. But trade is flourishing with China and non-boycotting Asian nations, making the sanctions moot. Some supporters of Suu Kyi, who endorses the boycott, charge that anyone who travels to Myanmar funds the generals. Others argue that tourism helps job-starved Burmese -- taxi drivers, food stall operators, postcard hawkers and artisans. As one guide told me, "If sanctions were 100% honored, I would say stay home, but since they're not, tell your friends to come. We need jobs." I considered the arguments and decided to go last year, steering clear of government hotels and viewing towers. Boycotts almost always hurt the little guy and seal off societies from outside eyes. Ancient Missiles Across the road, I spotted a staircase leading up the rickety bricks of the Somingyi temple and headed over for a scenic outlook. As I reached the stairs, a young man in a checked-green longyi, the traditional wrap-around sarong worn by most men here, pulled up on a motorcycle and introduced himself. "Sir, remember the feet," said a grinning souvenir salesman. I should have known the drill after a shoeless week at Buddhist sites around the country. All temple visitors must go barefoot anywhere on the premises, even the roof. It's a sign of respect. From the second-floor terrace the scene was surprisingly African -- sporadic acacia trees, scrubby amber grass -- except the big game here is spires. Dozens of temples and bell-shaped towers called zedis, ranging from 30 feet to 200 feet high, point to the heavens like ancient missiles. Zedis, the most evocative symbol of Myanmar, dominate town and village landscapes and loom above farmland. The profusion of temples and maroon-robed monks adds to the exotica of a land whose government-enforced isolation has made it a time warp of the Asia of decades ago. Bullocks pass for farm machinery. And the main transit system for ferrying goods is human -- on heads or bikes piled to gravity-defying heights. But the government has moved fast to bring Bagan up to modern tourism standards. Too fast for UNESCO archaeological experts, who pulled out of Myanmar after the regime's methods put paintings inside Bagan's temples at risk. The government later abandoned the paintings. Without proper preservation, thousands of works of art are threatened, one Burmese expert who asked not to be identified told me. I saw priceless murals of life in the 12th century under attack by termites, which target the sugar used in the ancient plaster. But the government has charged ahead with work on temple facades. It has grafted steeples onto topless monuments and rebuilt fallen structures without archaeological oversight. Just behind Somingyi, I spotted a new edifice going up. The souvenir salesman and I wandered over to watch a crew rebuild a small cube temple leveled by an earthquake. The construction techniques look like what might have been used for the original temples here -- bamboo ladder and scaffold, a pot of lime for mortar and bricks a-flying. The hurler was a skinny young woman in a straw hat who in another land might have a future on the softball mound. In the wilting sun, she flung brick after brick to a worker 12 feet up. I asked who was funding the job and was told, a private benefactor. Donors to Buddhist sites can win spiritual merit, a motivation that spurs contributions. Were the kings who built Bagan buying their way to nirvana? The souvenir salesman didn't know, but he was ready to get out of the furnace. I took him up on an offer of tea at his family's home and pedaled off on a dusty path to his nearby village. Golden Glow In a country that is 90% Buddhist, Bagan is a prime destination for the faithful, who arrive on jammed, decrepit mini-buses with pilgrims stacked on the roof like luggage. All Burmese try to visit the site at least once in their lives. The heart of the most revered temples is Old Bagan, home of the imperial capital, which was abandoned after it was overrun by the Mongols in the late 13th century. Of the hundreds of spires suspended in the haze of Old Bagan, Ananda Pahto stands out. The day before my bike expedition, I explored the majestic whitewashed structure, topped by an ornate, gilded steeple. It was built in 1105 in the prime of temple construction, which exploded after the Bamar king Anawrahta defeated the southern Mon armies in 1057 and united most of modern-day Myanmar under his rule at Bagan. Anawrahta went on a building tear, using the slave labor of conquered armies to raise Buddhist structures. Maybe that explains the proliferation of temples -- free labor. My guide that day didn't think so. He believed it was all about ego, a popular motive for the monumental works of ancient developers, from Egypt to Mayan realms. "The kings tried to outdo each other and show their power," he said. Anawrahta's successor, Kyanzittha, topped him by commissioning Ananda. Inside its giant teak doors and walls several feet thick, 20-foot golden Buddhas towered under soaring arches. Each stood in the teaching posture, arms outstretched, stylized in the Indian fashion, with long ears and transparent robe. Bagan's smorgasbord of sacred architecture contains Shwezigon, an imposing golden mountain that is the Taj Mahal of zedis. As I emerged from a shaded arcade into the sunlight torching Shwezigon, the blast of gold from the temple was blinding. The conical dome glowed above three staggered terraces, with ledges striped in burgundy, altogether a marvel of symmetry and elegance. The structure was covered in gold leaf, re-rubbed on by hand in postage stamp-sized bits every four years. The faithful padded clockwise in the Buddhist tradition around the gold pinnacle, stopping at shrines and altars to pray -- for happiness, health or good grades. A group of country girls dropped to kneel on the tile of an open-air temple. Lifting hands in prayer until thumbs touched foreheads, each bent forward to the ground in full prostration. Prayer is one of the few realms where Burmese are allowed to express themselves in this Orwellian land. Atop the steep, Mayan-like Shwesandaw temple, still open to rooftop viewing (others have been closed to funnel people to the government tower), I took in one of the most haunting horizons in antiquity. Spires tickling the twilight in all directions celebrated a Buddhist message lost on centuries of leaders: freedom, through enlightenment, compassion and egolessness. Captive Commentary Back on the bike, I realized it was almost noon, "the time of silent feet," as George Orwell called it, when humans head for any scrap of shade to escape the barbecue. I followed my friend, the souvenir salesman, to a poor but tidy village where the homes are made traditionally from bamboo and girls pull pails of water by rope from cement wells. I found his family under an awning etching lacquered bowls. Many families in the village are artisans -- in this case, the fourth generation of artists, said my friend's father, his teeth stained red by betel nut. A craftsman carved while four girls painted bowls. I asked them why there were so many temples in their backyard, but no one knew. "It's a blessing," my friend said. After a cooldown with this typically sweet Burmese family, I rode back into the broiler. I quickly bumped into one of the most beloved temples in Bagan -- Manuha Paya, a moldering structure named after the Mon king who was defeated and imprisoned by Anawrahta. According to legend, the Burmese ruler allowed Manuha to design his own temple, and the prisoner took advantage of it, creating a commentary on his captivity. Three giant seated Buddhas and a reclining statue are stuffed into cramped rooms, heads scraping the ceiling, shoulders jammed wall to wall. I watched as a group of the faithful -- old men with shopping bags, mothers with children, pilgrims -- silently did devotions at the foot of a boxed-in Buddha. Perhaps some were offering what I was told is the most popular prayer at this temple, one that speaks to a Buddhist legacy more enduring than the architectural exploits of kings and generals: the wish for freedom. (c) 2007 Joe Robinson, published in the Los Angeles Times |
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