Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 32

Pizza, chicken, hot dogs, and anger. And a little love, too.

A former colleague—someone I have not seen in a decade—was speaking to me this week, and while reminiscing, she said, “Remember that time you brought cold pizza and fried chicken and hot dogs for breakfast? That was amazing.”

It was. Kind of.

Years ago, each teacher in my school was responsible for providing breakfast for the faculty on a Friday throughout the school year. The faculty was much smaller back then, so providing breakfast for everyone was doable, and sometimes, you’d partner with someone to do two breakfasts together rather than flying solo.

One year, I decided to do something different. Instead of the usual breakfast options, I brought cold pizza, cold fried chicken, and hot dogs for breakfast, alongside soda, juice, and coffee. It was good pizza and fried chicken, too — purchased the evening prior from reputable establishments and chilled just right. In addition, I grilled hot dogs and toasted the buns on the spot in case someone wanted something to warm their tummy.

Many of my colleagues loved my breakfast; It brought back memories of high school and college mornings spent eating the leftovers from the night before.

Many, many more of my colleagues hated my breakfast. Expecting to find donuts, bagels, and perhaps an egg dish, they were instead greeted with cold pepperoni pizza, chilled drumsticks, and Ballpark franks.

Many people said many terrible things to me that day. Many more said terrible things about me to other people. Annoyed, hungry teachers roamed the hallways, disparaging me at every turn.

But here’s the thing:

Twenty years later, the people who loved that breakfast still remember it with great fondness. It was a breakfast like no other. Years later, they still credit me for my willingness to dare to be different, challenge norms, and create something unforgettable.

Those who despised my breakfast likely forgot about it long ago. Even if they still recall that breakfast today, it’s unlikely that they think poorly of me because of it.

If they still do, they are likely sour, sad sacks of humanity, worthless of my time and attention.

But even though most of my colleagues did not like my breakfast, many remember it more than two decades later.

I’ll venture to guess that no other breakfast in the history of my school is remembered at all.

This is why we must dare to be different.
Cut against the grain.
Defy expectations.
Snub our noses at norms.

Even when our choice to be different fails in the eyes (and tastebuds) of many, it’s also likely to be remembered for a long, long time.

Being remembered — doing something unforgettable — is almost always a good thing.

Being average, expected, routine, and therefore forgettable is standard fare in the land of the faithless, the fearful, and the mediocre. Sadly, this is the land where many people choose to live most of the time.

When we dare to be different, we will most assuredly fail from time to time, but we will also be recognized as innovators, daredevils, and trailblazers.

Sometimes the fools.

Best of all, we’ll be remembered.

I never repeated my pizza and fried chicken breakfast, but the following year, I put my experience as a short-order cook to work and set up two grills in the faculty lounge and cooked pancakes and eggs to order, which no one else had ever done. It wasn’t as amusing or transgressive as the previous year, and it’s probably not remembered nearly as well, but again, it was me, looking at something being done the same way, week after week, year after year, and asking myself, “How can I be different?”

My colleagues appreciated my scrambled eggs and chocolate chip pancakes, so I repeated those breakfasts for years. And yes, they became standard fare for me—somewhat routine and expected—but I was still the only teacher doing them, allowing me to remain different in a sea of donuts, bagels, and the occasional frittata.

John Batiste makes me happy.

Joy. Art. Hilarity. Music. Brilliance.It’s not often that you can find all of them in one place.John Batiste brings it here. I love this so much.I recommend waiting to watch it until you need to feel better about the world.These days, maybe that’s always.

Divider or continuer?

Here’s a quick exercise to understand yourself better:

Try to remember life as you lived it years ago. Back then, you cared deeply about certain things:

Little Debbie Snack Cakes. The Ramones. That girl in algebra class. Your pet raccoon.

Those are some of my deep concerns from the past. You can imagine your own.

You were also oblivious to things that would one day become critical to your existence:

Standing against tyranny. Your ability to hit a 70-yard approach shot. Parenting.

Think back on that early version of yourself. Now ask yourself:

Does that early version of you feel like you, or does it feel like an entirely different person?

If you have the former feelings — that earlier version of you is still very much you — you’re probably a Continuer.

If you have the latter feeling — that earlier version of you is someone very different than yourself — you’re probably a Divider.

A “Divider” believes they change over time and seeks to change themselves as they age.

A “Continuer” believes they remain the same essential person throughout life. 

This idea was first proposed by Jonathan Rothman in a 2022 New Yorker piece, “Becoming You.”

I am very much a Continuer. The person I was at ages 8, 15, 22, and 37 feels like exactly the same person I am today. I may be wiser and better informed than I once was, but otherwise, childhood Matt is the same person as adult Matt.

According to Rothman, those who believe you continue to be who you are — regardless of what happens during your life — tend to see their lives as constituting a story.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I very much see the things that happened in Mrs. Shultz’s sixth-grade algebra class as informing the person I am today, and my experiences in that algebra class and the moment I am experiencing now — as I type these words — are deeply connected.

In many ways, I see sixth-grade algebra class as having happened just a few moments ago.

I wonder if people who remember their past as well as I do tend to be Continuers because the past is always so present in our minds.

“Dividers” believe they develop different personality traits from those they had as children. Not only do Dividers believe they are periodically changing, but they often seek to change themselves as they get older.

Dividers tell the story of purchasing new homes or renovating their own — altering the layout and building on additions.

Continuers, by contrast, tell the story of an ancient, venerable property that remains itself regardless of what gets built or changed.

Rothman explains that as different as these two views sound, they have much in common. These categories, among other things, help us in our self-development.

By committing to a life of change, a Divider might constantly be looking for their next pivot or role. They are relentlessly refreshing their life with new and potentially wondrous things.

By concentrating on persistence of character and a lifelong narrative, a Continuer might be nurturing and refining their best self —  constantly examining and seeking to understand who they are and then adapting how they interact with the world.

I’m amazed that Dividers even exist. I can’t imagine what it might feel like to look back on the version of you decades ago and see a different person, detached from the one you are now.

It’s probably quite liberating to look back on the stupidities and cruelties of your past and chalk them up to a person different from yourself. Rather than dragging your failures, embarrassments, and shame around on your back, I imagine that Dividers get to put those things down and leave them behind, feeling like a new and better person.

Again, maybe much of this is attributed to memory. It’s easier to leave things behind when you don’t remember them well (or at all), and it’s easier to see yourself as someone different from the person you were two decades ago when that time only exists in your mind as a gauzy haze.

I’m not sure if I would prefer the mindset of a Divider, but it sounds lovely.

Dating differently at Stop & Shop

I was explaining to a client that doing something differently is often the best way to do it. While most people try like hell to conform to those around them, those who are daring enough, courageous enough, and wise enough to zig while everyone else is zagging will likely be appreciated, adored, and remembered.

It’s been one of the primary tenets of my life.

If everyone else is doing it, I will try to do it differently.

Or I’ll do something else entirely.

The story I offered my client — amongst the hundreds of stories I could have told — was this:

When I was 22 years old, I went on a first date with a woman named Christine, who I had thought was definitely out of my league. Nevertheless, I asked her out, and to my surprise, she said yes.

Given her beauty, sense of humor, and intelligence, I suspected that she had been on many dates, so I decided that my date would need to be different.

None of the usual trappings of a traditional first date.

So I brought her to Stop & Shop, and we proceeded to go shopping. I wasn’t really shopping for groceries — I was living in the pantry with a goat at the time and did not need to purchase groceries — but I knew three things:

No one had ever taken this woman to Stop & Shop on a date beforeThe aisles of a grocery store are lined with thousands of items, and many would prompt me to crack jokes, tell funny stories, and ask her lots of questions about herself.Good or bad, this date would be unforgettable.

Christine and I spent two hours going up and down the aisles at Stop & Shop, loading a cart with an array of random items. We talked. I told funny stories about bologna, elbow macaroni, and Little Debbie snack cakes. I brought the characters in the cereal aisle to life. We scraped the frost off the sides of open freezers and had a tiny snowball fight. We turned the advertising slogan “Leggo my Eggo” into a sexual reference.

When we finished our trip up and down every aisle of the store, I removed and purchased two things from the cart:

A can of vanilla frosting and a bottles of Coke.

Then we went into the parking lot, climbed onto the hood of my car, and ate the frosting from the can with a spoon I had brought for just that occasion and shared the soda.

Later, we kissed for the first time on the hood of my car under the yellow sodium-vapor lights of the parking lot.

Christine later told me it was the best date of her life. She worried that no date would ever compare.

It was a date I will never forget.

Thirty years later, I suspect that Christine remembers it, too.

Christine and I dated for a few months before breaking up. The craziness of my life at the time — sharing a pantry with a goat in the pantry of a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, working 16 hours a day at a bank and a McDonald’s to save enough money to pay a lawyer for my upcoming trial, and a violent robbery that left me with a lifetime of PTSD — was too much for a relationship to bear.

Christine was a college student. I was barely holding on.

She deserved more.

But it was one of those relationships I look back upon with great fondness, and it began in the aisles of a grocery store, with me telling stories about cream of mushroom soup, playing catch with oranges, and placing a note on the lobster tank that read, “Save us!”

I dared to be different, and though there was a chance it would not be appreciated, that almost never happens.

Steve Jobs wrote:

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things…”

I told my client to be different.
Do things differently.
Stop trying to conform to the people around her.
Choose to be unforgettable.

Easier said than done, I know. Different is hard. It’s often scary. It can feel dangerous.

But as I’ve often said, “The hard thing and the right thing are often the same thing.”

I’ve never liked onions so much

Small victories are still great victories.

Momentous victories.

Hilarious victories.

Case in point:

The Onion — the brilliant satirical publication that skewers newsmakers and current events so well that their articles are often mistaken as true stories by people unfamiliar with The Onion — said on Thursday that it had won a bankruptcy auction to acquire Infowars, a website founded and operated by the conspiracy theorist and all-round monster Alex Jones.

Alex Jones became infamous for propagating conspiracy theories, including one that the Sandy Hook massacre was faked, and he used his online media outlet, InfoWars, to convince small-minded idiots — of which there are apparently many — to believe him and purchase his merchandise and health supplements.

His propagation of this conspiracy theory — absent any evidence — put the families of the victims and the survivors through hell for years before Jones lost lawsuits totaling $1.4 billion.

The Onion said its bid for InfoWars was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and it plans to re-launch Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Jones, who traffic in misinformation and health supplements.

This is what I refer to as the zombie approach to warfare:

Turning your opponent and their weapons against them, amounting to a double loss.

It’s why you can’t realistically win a fight against a zombie army. They are constantly converting your soldiers into new zombies.

In a time when victories for the good guys feel few and far between, small wins like this are especially sweet.

As a bonus, I just learned that The Onion is now back in print with a physical copy of its monthly newspaper. I have two friends who I mock for still receiving physical newspapers every day, but in addition to Mad magazine, which I receive bi-monthly, I’ll now be receiving The Onion once per month.

A physical newspaper will soon be arriving at my home, too.

I can’t wait. Current headlines on The Onion include:

Man Forgetting Difference Between Meteoroid, Meteorite Struggles To Describe What Just Killed His DogU.S. Deploys SociallyAwkward Men Along Border To Deter MigrantsOffice Shooter Too Grossed Out To Kick Down Door Of Lactation RoomTrump Nods Vacantly As Elon Musk Rattles Off 10th Consecutive Video Game RecommendationOklahoma Law Requires Ten Commandments To Be Displayed In Every Womb

This will be $99 well spent.

A small contribution to the Rebel Alliance.

Also, a guaranteed laugh every month.

Early morning cravings go unsatisfied

I’m sure this has happened to you.

You awaken — bright-eyed and excited about the day — but then you feel the pang deep in your belly.

You want a McRib.

It’s like a BBQ fever dream where someone said, “What if we took a boneless rack of ribs but made it look like it still had bones, then slathered it in a sauce that tastes like a combination of summertime and falsehoods?”

It’s the sandwich equivalent of that friend who shows up uninvited but somehow makes the night unforgettable.

The McRib — a sandwich I love and oddly, I find myself craving this morning.

Where oh where could you be, you glorious sandwich?

Fear not. Several McRib finders exist online. Tragically, the only McRib sightings of late have been in Europe. North America, at least for the moment, is bereft of the McRib.

So much for that bright-eyed excitement to start my day.

If you want to read about someone with the same affection for the McRib as me, this quick, illustrated piece by Tony Wolf in the New York Times is lovely. 

“The compliment sandwich” is stupid.

I was offering feedback on the client’s upcoming keynote. I began by pointing out something she had done well. Before I could make my next point, she said, “I don’t need a compliment sandwich. Just tell me what to fix.”

“The idea of the compliment sandwich is stupid,” I said. “The idea was invented by people who are not teachers and do not understand how to effectively help people learn and change behavior.”

“Explain,” she said.

I told her that positive feedback is a highly effective means of teaching and promoting change. People often do something well without any awareness of what they are doing well — either innately or accidentally —  so offering positive feedback makes these things known and promotes their consistent use.

When I tell someone that I love the way they pause after landing a critical point in their talk, I’m making sure they know that these pauses are an excellent strategy for promoting audience understanding and retention so that they continue to pause at this moment and perhaps do so even more throughout the keynote.

When I tell a storyteller that the way they widen the lens for the audience is perfect for the scene, they may have no idea what they’re even doing. But by complimenting them on the strategy and explaining it in depth, they suddenly become aware of something in their storyteller toolbox that they can deploy again and again beyond the scene in question.

Positive feedback is just as effective in improving performance as offering critical feedback.

Maybe more so.

Compliments—positive feedback—should not be used to cushion critical feedback. They should help people become more aware and consistent of what they already do well.

Critical feedback — when presented properly with empathy, care, and respect — does not need a cushion. If you require a compliment sandwich to deliver critical feedback, you’re not doing it right.

After we finished our session, my client—the vice president of a large technology firm—said that she needed to rethink how she approached her team and offered feedback.

“No one ever told me compliments can change behavior,” she said. “But you’re right. When someone compliments me on a sweater, I’m more likely to wear that sweater. When someone tells me they like how I ran a meeting, I’m more likely to run it that way the next time.”

I complimented her on being so open-minded and reflective about what I had said in hopes of promoting that behavior in the future.

Open-minded and reflective clients — and people — are my favorite.

Killing time in the return

Last year, consumers in the United States returned $743 billion worth of merchandise, which amounts to 14.5 percent of all things purchased.

That’s an increase from 10.6 percent in 2020, according to the National Retail Federation.

This is exceptionally expensive for retailers. Given that a business must bear the costs of returning an unwanted good—including shipping, sorting, warehousing, and then all the work of selling the returned product to a discount wholesaler or the trash—this can seriously eat into profits.

Calibrating when to offer a refund, when to insist on a return, and how to identify customers abusing the system is now a new area of strategy and financial modeling for retailers.

But here is my greatest concern when it comes to returns:

Time.

Returning an item takes time. In many cases, it takes just as long to return an item as it does to purchase it, but after returning it, you’re left with nothing to show for the time spent both purchasing and returning.

You’ve essentially spent your precious time for nothing.

And that word — precious — is critical because, for many people, as much as they may see time as precious, they do not treat time preciously. They claim to value their time, but when you examine how they spend it, it’s clear that what they say and believe are two very different things.

They make thoughtless, careless, impulse purchases, confident that if they don’t like the item, they can simply return it for a refund, failing to factor in the time required to do so when making the purchase.

In many cases, they view purchases as rent-to-buy scenarios, wherein they take possession of an item with the option to purchase permanently but also the ability to recoup their rental price with the return of the item.

But all of this takes time.

Precious time.

Precious time too often treated like it is worthless.

With 14% of all purchases being returned in this country, an enormous amount of time is spent repackaging, driving to stores, post offices, and UPS outlets, waiting in lines, and explaining to customer service representatives why an item wasn’t just right.

This is what bothers me most about the magnitude of returns in this country.

The profit loss for companies is staggering.

The life lost for consumers is unfathomable.

 

Collect, believe, and wait until the time is right

In just over a month, I’ll celebrate 20 years of posting on my blog without ever missing a day.

That’s 7,304 consecutive days of finding something to say.

Not always something good or interesting or useful or even well written, but something.

I’ve been asked many times how this is possible.

How do you find something to write about every day?

One of my answers—and perhaps the best answer—is that I relentlessly collect ideas. Whenever I read, hear, or see something that interests me, I hold onto it, hoping that I’ll eventually have a means of expanding upon it, attaching it to another idea, or writing more at an opportune moment.

Sometimes, I write about these things immediately. Something happens in my life that I find interesting or entertaining or compelling, so I write about it the next day. But more often, ideas reside as blurbs of ideas, half-written posts, or links to stories I think I might find something to do with someday.

I currently have 181 of those types of drafts waiting to be written or finished.

The oldest is dated June 8, 2015, at 9:34 AM.

Almost a decade ago, I had an idea for a possible blog post and wrote it down.

It’s still waiting to be completed.

There are actually 12 drafts from 2015 waiting to be finished and two from 2016. More in every subsequent year including this year.

Will they all eventually become something I expand upon, connect to something else, and eventually finish?

I suspect so. If I take the time to start something, it’s usually worth finishing when the time is right.

Case in point:

Eight years ago, on October 14, 2016, I stumbled upon EB White’s brilliant letter to a despondent American about his optimism for the future. I copied and pasted that letter to begin a post, and I added this sentence:

“Someday, we may need this kind of optimism.”

Nine years later, two days after the election, I was looking for the right thing to say about the state of our country, and in scrolling through my drafts, I saw one titled “White’s optimism.”

“Maybe this,” I thought.

So I opened the draft, re-read the letter, and completed the post, thinking this was just right for this day.

It quickly became one of my most-read posts of 2024.

Tens of thousands of readers to the blog.
14,000 likes and almost 9,000 shares on Facebook.
Re-posts all over the internet.
A flood of emails from readers thanking me for it.

I was shocked.

I think I’ve written far more interesting, entertaining, insightful, and amusing posts this year.

I think I’ve written more insightful things this month.

But sometimes timing is everything. Give the people what they need, when they need it, and you can win the day.

How do I find something to write every day — without ever missing a day — for almost 20 years?

I collect ideas. I read, watch, and listen. I find ideas that interest me and hold onto them, hoping, trusting, and believing that I will someday find a way of making them meaningful to readers.

Sometimes, a decade-old idea can become gold.

Blue zones are filled with liars and cheats

Perhaps you’ve heard about the so-called “blue zones”—locations where humans are more likely to live longer due to lifestyle, diet, and other factors.

Blue zones have been getting much attention lately from people who want to hack the human body and find ways to live longer, healthier lives.

It appears that the most important factor contributing to longer life was quite unexpected:

Fraud.

Once researchers started investigating the secrets of these long-lived people, they found that the key to linking these communities was “poor recordkeeping” and access to government benefits via fraudulent accounting.

People were either pretending to be older to obtain senior benefits early or not reporting the death of a person to continue to receive their social security.

When Greece audited its centenarians, 72 percent of them disappeared overnight.

When Costa Rica conducted a similar audit, 42 percent were identified as fraudulent.

Just like that, thousands of pundits, podcasters, and publications touting the benefits of afternoon naps, olive oil, and figs were rendered irrelevant because a bunch of old people living in places where record keeping was sparse and the incentives for lying were considerable pretended to be even older than they are.

Long live the skeptic.