Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 122

Cowards

On Saturday 31 members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front were arrested near an Idaho pride event after they were found packed into the back of a U-Haul truck with riot gear. The men were standing inside the truck – faces covered by white balaclavas – when Coeur d’Alene police stopped the U-Haul and began arresting them on the side of the road.

White supremacist and hate groups like Patriot Front, Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers, are obviously dangerous. They are capable of causing widespread mayhem, destruction, and even death.

But it’s also important to remember that these groups are comprised almost entirely of cowards.

The members of these hate groups consist primarily of white men who are afraid of a world in which they no longer dominate the economic, cultural, and political landscape based solely on the color of their skin. These are racists and bigots who are afraid to compete on a more level playing field with women, people of color, members of religions other than their own, and the LGBTQ community It’s become harder for these men to climb the ladder of success now that others have been given better and more equal access to that same ladder.

Rather than working harder or smarter to achieve success, they fight to oppress human beings who don’t look or sound like them. They want to win through the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.

Like the KKK, they cover their faces with masks and balaclavas because they are frightened of being identified as racists and bigots.

These are dangerous men capable of causing enormous harm to our country, They should rightfully be feared, and every attempt should be made to stop them from perpetrating acts of terror and violence on our communities and political system.

But they are also cowards.

They are lashing out like wounded animals.

They are a loud, oftentimes well-armed, infinitesimal minority of the American public.

On Saturday, they were thankfully stopped, unmasked, arrested, and exposed for the cowards they are.

Positive in any way possible

We need as much positivity in our lives as we can muster.

Sadly, our brains retain and overvalue negative feedback over positive feedback, so we require about six positive statements to counteract one negative statement.

That is an incredibly difficult ratio to achieve.

Added to this unfortunate biological truth are all the haters in our lives:

People who are jealous of our happiness or success.

People who feel so awful or despondent about their own lives that they attempt to bring you down in order to feel better about themselves.

The complainers. The whiners. The defeatists. The pessimists. The hyperbolic. The selfish. The self serving. The bullies.

All of these people contribute to a world filled with negativity.

In my new book, Someday Is Today, I offer lots of strategies to help counteract this negativity and produce more positive outcomes in our lives.

Here’s one that isn’t in my book but was used by a Japanese Olympic curler  Satsuki Fujisawa at the 2022 Winter Olympics. A photographer took a picture of her right hand, where she had written the message:

I’m a good curler.
I have confidence.
Let’s have fun!

Brilliant. Positivity available whenever she needed it.

Fujisawa went on to win the bronze medal.

Increasing positivity in your life in any way possible is a smart and essential thing if you hope to live a full and complete life and make your dreams come true. And every little bit helps.

Even a simple message written on your hand.

Judges with the temperaments of children should not be judges

In a 4-3 decision at the Ohio Supreme Court, a judge’s decision to add six more years to a person’s sentence after the individual called them a “racist ass bitch” during sentencing was deemed unjustified and has been reversed. The defendant, Manson Bryant, was convicted of aggravated burglary and aggravated robbery and initially was sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Following the judge’s sentence, and in light of a co-defendant getting just 12 years for the same crime, Bryant had his emotional outburst, and in response, the judge added another six years onto his sentence, making it 28 years.

I certainly don’t support aggravated burglary and aggravated robbery – particularly after having been a victim of these crimes myself – but adding 2,190 days to a prison sentence because you’ve been insulted is something only done by a hypersensitive, irrational, vengeful, non-judicious jackass.

A lot of descriptors, I know, but each one seems especially apropos.

Perhaps this incident took place on the judge’s worst day, but even so, the judge should’ve had at least one much better day following this sentencing and reversed his decision.

But no, he allowed it to stand.

But what concerns me even more than the judge’s emotionally thin-skinned decision are the judges in the Ohio appeals court who upheld his decision, along with the three judges on the Ohio Supreme Court who did as well.

It was only by the single vote of one seemingly rational judge that this ridiculous, vengeful decision was reversed.

I hate being in the position of a defending violent felon, but the last thing I want is for a judge to be able to imprison an American for about 8 percent of their expected lifespan because the judge was called a name or because the decorum of their courtroom was somehow violated.

Apparently a whole bunch of judges in Ohio disagree with me.

This frightens the hell out of me.

Beverage talk is boring

We have a new rule in my classroom, proposed by a student, that my students and I fully support:

No more beverage talk.

Beverage talk is boring. If you’re telling us about your English breakfast tea or your fruity summer drink or your vitamin-infused water or your hot chocolate, you’re boring us.

Beverage talk sucks.

This goes for coffee, which I don’t drink but some of my students surprisingly do. We don’t want to hear about it. Somehow cheeseburgers and burritos are consumed with very little discussion, but when it comes to coffee, people speak about it incessantly as if it’s scintillating conversation.

It’s not.

We need more listeners in this world. If you feel the need to speak about the coffee you’re drinking, will be drinking, just finished drinking, or hope to be drinking, don’t. Make the world a better place by being a listener instead.

My students agree. They don’t want to hear their parents talk about their coffee ever again.

The same goes for alcohol, which my students don’t drink, and other than the occasional champagne toast, nor do I. If you’re talking about your alcoholic drink of choice, you should stop talking.

Beverages are not interesting

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule.

If you’re on a wine tasting adventure in the Napa valley, by all means speak about your beverages.

If you brew your own beer and are amongst beer aficionados, share your passion.

If you’re lost in the Gobi desert, your canteen nearly dry, by all means talk about water.

But unless there is something decidedly unique or apropos about your beverage, please drink it without comment. If the best you have to offer is a conversation about some past, present, or future beverage, then be a listener instead.

We need more listeners in the world

Also less damn talk about the liquids that we consume.

Of course, this rule only exists within the confines of my classroom. If you want to bore the world with your beverage talk outside my classroom, there’s nothing stopping you save your own internal filter.

The non-response is often the best response

As a person who receives a lot of feedback from folks online – and not always kind, generous, or even coherent – I often have to decide how to respond.

Listen closely, because this took me a long time to learn this lesson, but it has served me well:

The non-response is oftentimes the best response.

It’s hard to resist the desire to fire back upon receiving a scathing email or caustic message on social media. As a two-time state debate champion and lover of arguments, it sometimes takes all of my strength to resist engaging in verbal combat, but a non-response is usually best, for three very good reasons:

I have a choice: I can use my time to fight a small minded troll or uninformed reader, or I can make something new. Something of value. Something original and perhaps wonderful. I should almost always choose the latter. We all should.The non-response is loud. It’s endlessly echoing in the mind of someone trying to battle you online. The non-response is dismissive. It renders your detractor’s attack inert and meaningless. It’s painful to be ignored, so ignore your haters and remind yourself of how relentlessly annoying your non-response must be for them. It’s almost always far more painful and frustrating than any response could possibly be.Defending yourself against your attackers is almost never necessary. You may feel publicly attacked when someone goes after you on social media, but no one remembers or even cares. Your audience is never anxiously awaiting for your response. They have moved on, forgotten it already, and are busy looking at home prices or shopping for shoes or watching a YouTube video on gardening. What feels visceral and all encompassing to you is a forgotten breadcrumb to most.

I offer this advice (and much more) in my new book, Someday Is Today, as a means of reducing negativity in your life and recapturing precious time.

We need both things – less negativity and more time – if we hope to make our dreams come true.

The nonresponse affords us both of those things and defeats our detractors in the process, making it both incredibly easy and highly effective.

Campfire science

As a Boy Scout, I spent hundreds of nights camping outdoors, in tents, lean-tos, and under the stars.

As a result, I have also spent hundreds – if not thousands – of days and nights sitting beside a fire, cooking food, trying to stay warm, and passing the time.

Had you asked me if the smoke always seemed to follow me around the fire, I would’ve said yes. Absolutely. Annoyingly so. I would’ve told you that campfires don’t seem to like me very much.

It turns out that smoke follows everyone around a fire because of science.

My Scout leaders knew a great deal, but they never taught me this simple, scientific principle, nor did they teach me the means by which of counteract this annoying reality.

For that information, I needed to wait nearly five decades and stumble upon the answer on YouTube.

Perhaps I can convince the Boy Scouts of America to include this in the next edition of their Boy Scout Handbook, of which I have my original childhood copy as well as one from a couple years ago.

Nothing in either edition about smoke following you around a campfire and how to stop it from happening.

I’ll write a letter.

Sunny Day might be here

Back on March 23, 2020, I posted the music video for Bruce Springsteen’s “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day” in my class’s Google Classroom. During our first online meeting, I told my students that this pandemic would eventually end, masks would become a thing of the past, vaccines would protect us, and life would return to a normal.

A new normal, perhaps, but one in which we could once again gather in groups, hug one another, and smile.

I’ve listened to “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day” about a thousand times since that day, waiting for that sunny day to arrive. I’ve played it for my students. I’ve been tempted, more than once, to declare that our sunny day had arrived.

Back in June of 2021, before the delta variant diminished the effectiveness of vaccines and caused a spike in infection, Elysha and I went to Springsteen on Broadway, maskless. We ate in a restaurant in New York City, maskless. Other than presenting a vaccine card at the door, it felt as if life had returned to normal.

Thanks to the vaccines, we felt safe.

That lasted about six weeks, then delta came along and made things more challenging. Omicron followed, and currently we have omicron’s sub-variants in our midst.

Not ideal, but I think I’m ready to declare that the sunny day has finally arrived.

COVID-19 is still infecting large numbers of Americans, but thanks to the vaccines and therapeutics, the vast majority of people being hospitalized and dying are unvaccinated.

I don’t want anyone to die, but at least now, you have a means of reasonably determining your own fate.

Get vaccinated. Get boosted. Get double boosted if you’re over 50 and feel it prudent. Maybe even wear a mask in congregate settings if that makes you feel safe. Then move on.

We also have highly effective therapeutics now, so even if you’re infected, we can now treat the disease rather well.

In school, we now have the choice over whether to wear a mask or not. Most students and staff don’t wear them, but some do. Equally important, no one cares. No one is questioned or taunted or teased for wearing or not wearing one.

Infection rates remain low. Hospitalization and death rates remain low. Businesses are open. People are traveling. I’m even performing again in large theaters.

COVID-19 will likely always be with us, but thanks to science, it will no longer be the deadly plague that it once was. Long COVID remains a problem for many that still requires a solution, but with every tick of the clock, scientists get closer to developing better therapeutics, more effective vaccines, better treatments, and flying cars.

I think I’m ready to call it after more than two years:

A sunny day is finally here.

Matthew Dicks’s 7 Maxims on Rule Followers and Rule Breakers

My new book, Someday Is Today: 22 Simple, Actionable Ways to Propel Your Creative Life, contains a chapter entitled, “Be a Criminal.”

The lessons of the chapter is this:

Sometimes we need to bend or break the rules in order to succeed. If we spend our lives walking the straight and narrow, we will miss out on opportunities otherwise denied to us by inanity, stupidity, or the tragically pedantic nature of others.

Read the chapter. It’s a good one. But until then, allow me to offer this list that didn’t make it into the pages of the book:

Matthew Dicks’s 7 Maxims on Rule Followers and Rule Breakers

Rule followers think they are constantly being watched.

Rule breakers know the truth.

_____________________________________

Rule followers believe that the majority of rules make good sense.

Rule breakers are skeptical about the usefulness of almost any rule.

_____________________________________

Rule followers believe in the maxim, “Why reinvent the wheel?”

Rule breakers believe in the possibility of better wheels.

_____________________________________

Rule followers worry about getting in trouble all the time.

Rule breakers rarely worry about getting in trouble  – and rarely do.

_____________________________________

Rule followers define a boss’s admonition as “getting in trouble.”

Rule breakers characterize a boss’s admonition as “feedback.”

_____________________________________

Rule followers are often deeply unhappy with rule breakers.

Rule breakers rarely think about rule followers.

A remarkable accomplishment, but a remarkably lucky one, too.

A Rhode Island man recently achieved a goal he spent nearly two decades working toward  — earning his Ph.D. and becoming a physicist.

At Brown University, no less. A prestigious Ivy League university.

That accomplishment would be impressive enough, but what makes Manfred Steiner achievement truly remarkable is that he’s 90 years-old.

Steiner successfully defended his dissertation back in November, earning a degree he had always wanted after overcoming health problems that could have derailed his studies.

“But I made it,” he said. “And this was the most gratifying point in my life, to finish it.”

As a teenager in Vienna, Steiner was inspired to become a physicist after reading about Albert Einstein and Max Planck. But after World War II, his mother and uncle advised him that studying medicine was a better choice, so he earned his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1955 and emigrated to the United States, where he had a successful career studying blood and blood disorders.

Steiner found medical research satisfying, but it wasn’t quite the same as his fascination with physics.

“It was something like a wish that was never fulfilled, that always stuck in the back of my head,” he said. “I always thought, you know, once I’m finished with medicine, I really don’t want to spend my life just sitting around and maybe doing a little golfing or doing something like that. I wanted to keep active.”

At age 70, he started taking undergraduate classes at Brown. He was planning to take a few courses that interested him, but by 2007, he accumulated enough credits to enroll in the Ph.D. program.

Nearly two decades later, he completed that program.

Steiner’s advice is this:

“Do what you love to do. Pursue it because later in life you maybe regret it, that you didn’t do that.”

My new book, Someday Is Today, warns against this very thing. Hospice workers have reported that regret is one of the most common and painful feelings in the last days of someone’s life. Looking back over the expanse of time, people take note of the things they never did and wish they could change the past or had more time.

They planned on doing those things someday, but then they ran out of somedays.

I experienced this very same feeling when I was 21 years-old, lying on a greasy, tile floor in a McDonald’s in Brockton, Massachusetts, with a gun pressed to my head, absolutely certain that my life was coming to an end.

It wasn’t fear or anger or sadness that I was feeling in what I thought were the final moments of my life.

It was regret. And it was awful.

Manfred Steiner’s accomplishment is remarkable, but he also got lucky. The average life expectancy in the United States is 78 years old. Had he lived as long as the average American, his warning about regret would’ve come true for him.

It’s never too late, people, but someday is not tomorrow or next week or next year.

Someday Is Today.

Available wherever you get books.

“Someday Is Today” is born today!

“Someday Is Today: 22 Simple, Actionable Ways to Propel Your Creative Life” publishes today!

My book’s birthday!

It’s a book written to help anyone who wants to accomplish almost anything in this world. In you have a dream that you’ve been chasing, or perhaps you have a dream that you’ve been putting off for years, this book is for you.

But it’s also for anyone who wants to make more of their days and accomplish more, whether that means building a business, making art, learning something new, spending more time with family, traveling, or simply finding more time to sit on the couch and read a book.

If you want to do more, regardless of what that may be, this book is for you.

Purchase it wherever you get books, but ideally, purchase it at your favorite indie bookseller. Booksellers and bookshop owners are the book angels of the world. They deserve your love.

This particular book is near and dear to my heart for a number of reasons:

My wife, Elysha, wrote and recorded the foreword to the book, and my friend, Shep, wrote and recorded the afterword. I’m so thrilled to have their voices as a part of this book.The book is dedicated to my former boss and current mentor and friend, Plato Karafelis. Dedicating a book is perhaps the most joyous part of writing any book, and I was thrilled to dedicate this one to Plato.This book features references to so many of my friends, including Jeni Bonaldo, Steve Brouse, Kaia Pazdersky, my agent Taryn Fagerness, my mother-in-law Barbara Green, and many more.It’s my eighth published book. Six novels and now two books of nonfiction. This astounds me. It seems like yesterday that I received the call from my agent, Taryn, telling me that Doubleday had made an offer on my first novel “Something Missing.” A dozen years later, I find myself with eight published books on my shelf. One book was miraculous. Eight still seems impossible yet true.

Books are born in many ways. For me, it’s often a “What if?” question. But this book was born from two different sources:

The question I am asked most often when standing in front of people is how I do all that I do. In the past, I’ve offered haphazard explanations or a handful of strategies, but I always knew that the real answer would take hours to explain. This book answers that question in full.Four years ago, my friend, Erin Barker, was looking for a creative nudge, so we spoke for about an hour on the phone. I gave her a list of ideas that might help do more creatively. At the end of the call, she said, “You should write that as a book.” After some thought, I agreed. In fact, the contents of that phone call served as the initial outline for the book.

This book may not exist today had Erin not nudged me creatively that day.

If you’d like to help my book become a success, you could do the following:

Buy it! Purchase a multitude of copies of you’d like, in any format you’d prefer. If you like audiobooks, I narrate this one myself.Rate and/or write a review for the book and post it wherever you’d like. Ratings and reviews help others to see my book more easily.Post about the book on social media. Take a photo of yourself or your loved one or your cat reading the book. Place the book in fun and amusing places. Let your friends and family and coworkers know that it exists.If you work in a place where this book might be well received, let people know about it. I already know of one company that is purchasing the book for their employees. If IBM would just agree to do the same, I could sell about 300,000 copies in one fell swoop!If you can’t find the book at your local bookshop, ask a bookseller to order a copy for you. This will increase the chances of them stocking it in the future.Attend my book launch party on June 18. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Eat, drink, and be merry along with me, Elysha, Shep, my kids, and fellow book lovers. Details here.

Any one of these things would be enormously appreciated.

Most importantly, I hope you enjoy the book, and I sincerely hope it helps you to make your dreams come true. “Someday Is Today” is the idea that far too many people in this world assume that there will be time to to build the life they’ve always wanted, but “someday” is a mirage. It’s a false and insidious notion that simply allows you to waste precious time until it’s too late.

Someday is today. Begin now. Change your life this very day.

I hope my book can help you on this journey.