Book Cracking The Code

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Riitta Palazzo

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Aug 3, 2024, 4:11:12 PM8/3/24

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When you talk about why you do what you do, you stand out from everyone else that does what you do. But in order to do that, you need to know what your WHY is. Dr. Gary Sanchez joins Dr. Misner this week to introduce the 9 WHYs. Everyone has all nine WHYs, but one is dominant in each of us.

Gary:
Yeah. So, like in your case, your WHY is to contribute to a greater cause, right? Add value, have an impact in the lives of others. So you use your time, your money, your energy, your connections to push other people forward.

Gary:
Yeah. And so one of the great things about that is once I figured out there was nine WHYs, I figured out that one of them is your WHY, one of them is your How, and one of them is your What. And so your message becomes even clearer when you know all three. So, can I use you as the example?

Gary:
Are you going in the right direction? And then you can build your messaging, marketing, and branding, all based on your WHY.os, so that you stand out from everybody else who does what you do.

This podcast is sponsored by www.misneraudioprograms.com. These audio programs will provide you with the tools and the inspiration to powerfully enhance your BNI experience. So check out the great material available to you at www.misneraudioprograms.com and then use the promo code IVAN50 for 50% off of everything [this code is good for a limited time]. All of the proceeds go to the BNI Foundation.

Besieged by requests for my reaction to The Da Vinci Code, I finally decided to sit down and read it over the weekend. It was a quick romp, largely fun to read, if rather predictable and preachy. This is a good airplane book, a novelistic thriller that presents a rummage sale of accurate historical nuggets alongside falsehoods and misleading statements. The bottom line: the book should come coded for "black light," like the pen used by the character Sauniere to record his dying words, so that readers could scan pages to see which "facts" are trustworthy and which patently not, and (if a black light could do this!) highlight the gray areas where complex issues are misrepresented and distorted.

"The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable" (p.232), but that does not mean "Nothing in Christianity is original." The relationship between early Christianity and the world around it, the ways in which it was culturally embedded in that world, sometimes unreflectively, sometimes reflexively, sometimes in deliberate accommodation, sometimes in deliberate cooptation, is far more complicated than the simplistic myth of Constantine's Stalinesque program of cultural totalitarianism. Further, Constantine's religious life -- whether, when, how and by what definition he was Christian and/or "pagan" -- is a much debated issue because the literary and non-literary sources (such as coins) are not consistent. That Constantine the emperor had "political" motives (p.234) is hardly news to anyone! The question is how religion and politics (which cannot be separated in the ancient world) were interrelated in him. He is as hard to figure out on this score as Henry VIII, Osama Bin Laden, Tammy Fay Baker and George W. Bush. Brown has turned one of history's most fascinating figures into a cartoon-ish villain.

"Paganism" is treated throughout The Da Vinci Code as though it were a unified phenomenon, which it was not ("pagan" just being the Christian term for "non-Christian"). The religions of the Mediterranean world were multiple and diverse, and cannot all be boiled down to "sun-worshippers" (232). Nor did all "pagans" frequently, eagerly, and with mystical intent participate in the hieros gamos (ritual sex acts). "The Church" is also used throughout the book as though it had a clear, uniform and unitary referent. For early Christian history this is precisely what we do not have, but a much more complex, varied and localized phenomenon. Brown presumes "the Church" is "the Holy Roman Catholic Church" which he thinks had tremendous power always and everywhere, but ecclesiastical history is a lot messier.

Brown propagates the full-dress conspiracy theory for Vatican suppression of women. Feminist scholars and others have been debating different models of the "patriarchalization" of Christianity for decades. Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza's landmark work, In Memory of Her (1983), argued that while Jesus and Paul (on his better days) were actually pretty much pro-women, it was the next generations (the authors of letters in Paul's name like 1 and 2 Timothy and others) who betrayed their feminist agenda and sold out to the Aristotelian, patriarchal vision of Greco-Roman society. Others (unfortunately) sought to blame the misogyny on the Jewish roots of Christianity. More recently it has been argued that the picture is more mixed, even for Jesus and Paul. That is, they may have been more liberal than many of their contemporaries about women, but they were not all-out radicals, though they had ideas (such as Gal 3:28) that were even more revolutionary than they realized (in both senses of the term). Alas, no simple story here. And while obsessing over Mary Magdalene, The Da Vinci Code ignores completely the rise and incredible durability and power of the other Mary, the mother of Jesus, and devotion to her which follows many patterns of "goddess" veneration (she even gets the Athena's Parthenon dedicated to her in the sixth century).

This list is just a sample. A "black light" edition of The Da Vinci Code would, however, be unnecessary if readers would simply take the book as fiction. But there is an obstacle: the first page of the book reads, under the bold print headline "Fact": "all descriptions of ...documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate."

Author, Margaret M. Mitchell, is Associate Professor of New Testament at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Chair of the Department of New Testament and Early Christian Literature. Her latest book is The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation (Westminster/John Knox, 2002).

Code enforcement plays a vital role in housing policy, affecting both residents' health and safety and the cost of providing and maintaining housing. Housing codes cover the safety and quality standards for individual dwelling units and, in many cases, provide other tenant protections, while building codes govern the construction and maintenance of all physical structures more broadly. Most cities enforce these through a single code enforcement department. Examining how cities write and enforce their housing codes can offer important insights into their priorities. Moreover, the goals and mechanisms of code enforcement have been vigorously debated, with stakeholders from a wide range of perspectives opining on how code enforcement agencies can best meet the needs of tenants and landlords while avoiding adverse or unintended consequences.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: Three years ago, back in 2019, I sat down with Arthur Brooks, the writer and social scientist, and he told me about an experience he had had on a plane where he'd found himself seated in the row ahead of an older gentleman.ARTHUR BROOKS: And he was talking to his wife, and I was - I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but I couldn't help but hear. And he was saying he wished he were dead. And I thought it was somebody who must have been really disappointed about his life. But then at the end of the flight, he stood up and I recognized him as somebody who's really quite prominent and who'd done a lot with his life. And I thought to myself, what's he doing wrong?KELLY: In other words, if this really prominent, really successful person wasn't happy with his life, what does it say for the rest of us trying to find purpose, relevance, even joy as we age? Well, Arthur Brooks had started noodling the question. He had written a piece for The Atlantic, a piece he has now turned into a book. It is titled "From Strength To Strength." Arthur Brooks, welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.BROOKS: Thank you. Great to be with you.KELLY: So in the three years since I have seen you, you clearly realized you had a lot more to say on this topic, this topic of aging and finding success in later life. Lay out for us the big question you're exploring in the book.BROOKS: Well, I started doing research. Again, I'm a social scientist, but this is very personal. This is mesearch (ph) more than research, really. You know, what can we expect if we're trying to work so hard to build something with our lives? And I found that half the population tends to get happier and happier after 65 or 70, and the other half of the population more or less starts to go back down. And the group that goes back down often includes the strivers, the people who have worked so hard, because the party ends.And look. If you don't do anything or don't do too much with your life, you don't know when it's over. But if you've worked really hard to build things, to meet your goals, to get rewarded, when it finishes, it can be incredibly disconcerting, disappointing, even devastating to people. And that's what I found. And so I went in search of the solutions to that problem to look at the people who had cracked the code. And I think I might've found it.KELLY: OK. Well, before we get there, because now you've wet my appetite, but let me just make clear what - how you are framing this. This is a conversation about the second half of life, which you are defining as when? Like, what age? I'm a little worried about your answer, I got to say.BROOKS: Well, so it's actually quite interesting given the fact that we live so much longer than when I was a kid. You know, when I was little, the average age to death for a man was 67. Now, if you live - I'm 57 years old, and I'm in perfect health as far as I know. And actuarial tables say that I have even odds of living past 95. So let's just say your adult life starts at 20. If that's the case and you're in good health, you can pretty much expect or you should expect to live to 90, in which case half of your adult life is over at 55. And that means you have the second half left starting at 55.KELLY: And I will note this is fundamentally an optimistic book. I mean, the title, "From Strength To Strength," it's not from feeble to feebler. That is where your data, your research has left you, that you're optimistic about our later years.BROOKS: Incredibly. I mean, I started it out - it was pretty grim, the man on the plane. And I thought, oh, my goodness, is this what we have to look forward to? And I found that there are people who have cracked the code but, more importantly, that we don't have to leave happiness in the second half of life up to chance and, furthermore, that we can find a new kind of success if we're willing to make some jumps and some changes and show some humility and have an adventure that's better than the first half.KELLY: Before we get to how to crack the code, can I just question the premise that there is, in fact, a code to crack? I mean, I'm thinking I can point to people in my field, in journalism, in politics, in law, all kinds of professions who are at the top of their game in their 50s, in their 60s, in the 70s and beyond. Are they - what? - outliers, the exception that proves the rule, what?BROOKS: Generally speaking, they're the ones who have found the secret to second-half success. In other words, there's a different formula for succeeding in the early part of your life and career than that which is actually most appropriate for the second half. It requires different skills and a different emphasis. And those people that we see in almost every profession that are thriving as they get older, they're the ones who've been able to make the shift.KELLY: Yeah. And just again, for people thinking, huh, really, I introduced you as a social scientist. You're saying this based on data that you have gone through, compiled and looked at.BROOKS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to say secrets, it makes it sound like there's some sort of hack. No, you got to do the work. You can't just wish for it and you can't hope you get lucky. And that's the point. The point of the work that I'm doing as a social scientist is to not leave your happiness up to chance but to remarkably increase the odds by doing the work at 25 and 45 and 65 so that by the time you're 75 and 85 and beyond, you're happier than you've ever been.KELLY: So how do we do it? How do we increase the odds?BROOKS: Well, to begin with, there's a very interesting set of findings that said that success early on is based on one of two types of intelligence. The first is called fluid intelligence, which gives you the ability to solve problems, to crack the case, to innovate faster and to focus harder than pretty much all the competition early on in your career. This is your Elon Musk brain.And this increases through your 20s and into your 30s. But then it tends to decline through your 40s and 50s, meaning that you need to move to the second kind of intelligence, which is increasing in your 40s and 50s and even your 60s, and it will stay high for the rest of your life. That's called your crystallized intelligence, which is your wisdom, your ability to compile the information that's in your vast library to teach better, to explain better, to form teams better - in other words, not to answer somebody else's questions but to form the right questions.KELLY: You started to touch on something, and I just want to follow up on it. For younger people listening, people who are definitively in the first half of life...BROOKS: Right.KELLY: ...Is there stuff they should have in the back of their heads now so they're better prepared for when they get there?BROOKS: Yeah. No. 1 is that you don't have just one formula, that you're going to change. One of the biggest things that I teach my students at the Harvard Business School is that what you think right now is not what you're going to think later. The things that you want are not the things that you're going to want later. Your abilities are going to change. Your views are going to change. The things you care about is going to change. And that's good and that's healthy. And that kind of flexibility is key.KELLY: I am thinking about that since you and I first spoke about this three years ago, the world has thrown all of us a huge old curve ball in the form of a pandemic. Everybody's reconsidering their lives and trying to figure out how to live more productive lives longer. Does the pandemic accelerate trends you were already investigating?BROOKS: It certainly can because people have had time to look inward. This has been, you know, a terrible scourge. Everybody knows that the pandemic is not something that we wanted, but it's also been an incredible opportunity for a lot of people. I mean, for me, I was able to quietly write this book and set up a strategic plan for the rest of my life. A lot of other people tell me similar stories of how they deepened their relationships, that they understood themselves better. And this is something that we should remember as we get back into the hustle and bustle of non-pandemic life, I mean, assuming that we go back to something like normal, which I think we are. Let's not forget that there are certain things that we don't want to go back to.KELLY: We have been speaking with Harvard professor Arthur Brooks. His new book is "From Strength To Strength: Finding Success, Happiness And Deep Purpose In The Second Half Of Life." Arthur Brooks, thank you.BROOKS: Thank you.