Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes is a fantastic book so far. Halfway through, I am fairly certain it could be retitled “Good Science, Bad Science” or perhaps “Good Science, Bad Science, Crappy Politics.” I’d say that you wouldn’t believe the politics that affect your food, but knowing the sort of discerning, intelligent folks who read this site, uh, you probably would. And do. And weep, just like me.

As we know, it’s not just food industry and availability that political climate affects, but national dietary policy and recommendations. Right here (in this book) is where we realize that we can’t trust anyone but ourselves and (maybe) a few well-chosen researchers. Disheartening. Discouraging. Infuriating!

The problem is, no one can give you a straight line on nutrition because no one really has a straight line on nutrition. Scientists trust other scientists to provide them with accurate environmental information surrounding their preferred subject, because no scientist can get the truth about everything on her own. She has to stand on the backs of the researchers who went before, and she has to assume that the information she’s been given is reasonably correct. Otherwise, she’d have to start from scratch. I’m sure there are scads of examples where this works just fine. Taubes tells us a story of where it didn’t.

Taubes’ book explains how massive fumbles get made. So far, he’s told us how science mistook the merits of a low-fat nutritional regimen for the merits of a regimen low in refined carbohydrates. The intrigue is insane. I never read War and Peace, but I bet it’s a little bit like this. Dense. Informationally intense!

Of course, I can’t trust Taubes, either—not exclusively. Not even when I’m this grateful to him for further opening my eyes to the vagaries of food politics! (I like him and all, don’t get me wrong. And I love the book!) But I can make a judgment about where to get my information and how to rate my sources in a reasonable manner. I’m quite fond of Michael Pollan, and he has good things to say about Gary Taubes. Halfway through Taubes’ book, I’m pretty impressed with his attention to detail and follow-through and thorough (-seeming, as I am not a nutrition scientist) grasp of the history and circumstances surrounding the arguments of fat and cholesterol and refined carbohydrates. A lot of the stuff he says makes me blink in disbelief, and much of it leaves me unsurprised. Yeah. People can get mixed-up. Especially people with important roles to play, especially people entrusted to make policy that affects hundreds of thousands of others.

What does this mean? Don’t trust the folks in charge? Ignore the rules? Take down the government? Well… probably not. Everyone makes mistakes, and sometimes there’s nothing you can do about a mistake made on a grand scale. (This is NOT an excuse for some of the folks Taubes writes about in the book, but it’s not an indictment either. Who knows what they could have chosen to do differently? It doesn’t matter now.) We can, however, be more hands-on when it comes to decisions made about our health and well-being. We can do our own science in our own ways. We can absorb information and test it, instead of parroting it and calling it canon without real knowledge of whether it’s true or not. We can listen to our bodies and learn to make decisions that affect us positively, instead of fooling ourselves into believing that someone else will always know better, someone else will always take care of us.

Someone else won’t always take care of us. Not only won’t, but can’t, because we are the only souls truly capable of being stewards of our own lives. That counts in health, it counts in work, it counts everywhere across the board. You need to take care of you. If that means climbing a few learning curves and paying attention to the world around you (and the responses within you), so be it. Get going.

If we don’t start paying attention and taking care of ourselves, we’ll just keep getting sick and dying and trying to blame it on somebody else.

And that’s just stupid.

Early yesterday morning Seth Godin wrote that the world is getting smaller every day. You—yes, YOU —have the ability to touch and change the lives of people you’ll never once meet in person, often from your living room. The ways in which we affect the world around us are sometimes thrilling, sometimes humbling, but all of them are important. The smallest thing that makes a difference is still very necessary.

I’ve already started to hear whispers and reviews of Jacqueline Novogratz’ book, first from Seth and then from others. It’s called The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World. There’s no doubt that it’s worth reading—the way it was, doubtlessly, worth living.

Ms. Novogratz actually founded the Acumen Fund, and the things they do are heartening. As high-impact positive enterprises go, the Acumen Fund is impressive. (Not to mention that they have truly great champions.)

For each copy of The Blue Sweater sold this week, an additional $15 will be donated to the Acumen Fund. This will affect the first 5,000 copies sold, and the money is coming from an anonymous $75,000 matching grant. I suspect those copies will go quickly (especially considering Seth’s wide-ranging readership), but each of the people who buy them will be changing the world in just a little way. It will take almost no effort at all. It’s such a small thing to reach out make a difference, somewhere. It’s the little things that add up, and really count.

I want to be a part of that (and I ordered my book this morning).

I’m pretty sure you do, too.

This week began the first principle in Dale Carnegie’s book for a small group of Alt MBA students who expressed interest in taking How to Win Friends and Influence People in measured steps. Until Sunday night (and hopefully much longer!), we’ve resolved not to criticize, condemn, or complain.

I have a teeny case of the high horse here, but this is still hard for me. If you’re used to criticizing and complaining, it can be hard to give up. It can be hard to see how it could possibly benefit you to quit! In fact, it can feel a lot like you’re giving up your power to affect the world around you—after all, many of us learned directly from our parents that the best way to change other people was to harp at them. (Don’t worry. You’re not alone.)

The thing is, criticism and complaints don’t actually get you anywhere. You may feel like they’re letting you vent, getting it out of your system, or helping you work through a difficult problem—but the criticism and the complaints parts of the equation don’t get you closer to those goals. They set you back from them. Any specific negativity will do this. If you’re succeeding, it’s in spite of yourself. (Incidentally, some incredibly successful people have removed complaints from their routine, not even counting Dale.)

You know as well as I do that resolutions like this one are tough, but the effects they have on your life are amazing. You start to understand people better, and it’s easier to empathize with them. It’s easier to imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes and grok what they’re going through. It dramatically reduces the amount of negativity, conflict, and drama in your life. (You think your life is hard? Quit criticizing, quit condemning, and quit complaining. It will get ridiculously easier—almost overnight!)

I don’t care what you have to do. Bite your tongue. Use a substitute (at one time, I was partial to “bananaphone”). Replace one set of habits with another. Stand on your head, or give someone a buck, or toss a piece of chocolate into the trash every time you hear a complaint coming out of your mouth. (Or switch your 21-day no complaints bracelet to the other wrist, and start all over again.) It doesn’t matter what it takes; if you make this happen, you’ll see a great change in your life, and you won’t be all that sure you want to go back to the way things were.

What are they worth anyway, complains and criticism? They remind you that you’re feeling bad. They don’t lead you to solve the problem—the more you complain, the less you’re solving anything at all. Often, complaints make the people around you uncomfortable (depending on their intensity, and your environment) and unfettered criticism definitely makes someone somewhere feel bad—if not, you have to wonder if they’ll eventually find out, which isn’t all that enjoyable either.

Instead of criticizing, try to understand what the other person is going through. Realize that you’d probably be doing the same thing if you were them. Offer constructive suggestions, but don’t simply tell a person what she’s doing wrong. That never helps. Tell her what she’s doing right—and help her along.

Instead of complaining, build an intelligent plan to manage the thing you’d otherwise be complaining about. Make a change. Make a lot of changes! Don’t bemoan your lot—fix it. You’ll get more done in less time, and your friends will quit worrying that someday, it’ll be them you’re complaining about. Be positive, be optimistic, and be constructive. You’ll feel great about yourself, and productive, too—you’ll grow faster.

You know me, I’ll do anything in the name of conscious growth. ;}

So give it a try, will you?

I started Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers recently. I read it out of the book sometimes, and listen to the audiobook sometimes, like I did with Made to Stick. It’s pretty leisurely as absorption goes, but it’s enjoyable. Plenty of spaces between lines to think a little.

So I’ve been thinking.

Since I’m still early on in the book, I’ve been musing a lot about school. I was crap in school. I didn’t fail things (much) but I generally managed grades just good enough to scrape by. “Good grades” was not a worthy adversary.

Before college, I wrote stories and drew pictures. A new friend in middle school had introduced me to the idea of making comic books, and I was down with that. I could create whatever I wanted. They never saw the light of day, but they were my primary pursuit. The only really interesting thing around!

In college, I started to become aware that my family had money problems, and they started to affect me more dramatically than they’d used to—anyway, that’s what the memory feels like. I knew more about them in college, and I was more aware of a particularly cogent, familial financial climate. I can’t remember what I was driven by when I started learning about the internet and thinking about “running a business”. I could tell you that it was about bringing in more money for the family unit (that is what it turned into), but I don’t know how it started. I just don’t remember.

I think it was that I noticed something that felt worthy of doing. So I did it.

I don’t know where Gladwell is going with this book, but I know it’s making me wonder about myself. I can feel those tiny impulses—you have them, too—every moment I scan a sentence or parse a spoken phrase. These are impulses to find in the outside world proof that I am relevant.

Something that tells me for sure that I’m good enough.

My IQ is high. At least, it was when I was little—in the last fifteen years I’ve a) had a strange sensation that suggests it’s oozing downward along my spine and b) discovered that IQ truly doesn’t matter as much as I was originally taught. I know that I’m creative, and I clearly can do really nifty things. (Otherwise, I’m not sure how I’ve gone this long without a “job”. It’s been at least five years, technically... How have I been paying the rent, again?)

But I’m still looking for validation. I know we all are. I’m looking for a sign from the universe that I’m doing the Right Thing. That the path I want can really be reached from the path I’m on. And so the strange uneasy feeling engendered by the first few chapters of Gladwell’s book, I think, is a result of me wanting him to say what I want to hear.

You know. As if he might know!

I have a lot of things that are supposed to mean something. The IQ thing. Test scores, percentiles. Taught myself to read, ostensibly. Whatever else. But none of this really means anything. The sheer non-issue of my mediocre grades in school should prove that. I feel good about hearing that none of it really means anything past a certain point. I am down with that. But if he’s going to say that those things don’t count, what does?

And is it going to be something I can get my hands on?

Have you ever had this feeling?

This is it, folks—last section in the book! I did this one on the fly late Friday night after returning from a wedding. I proved to myself exactly how quickly I could put a video together, at top speed and slightly deprived of sleep (that is, a 6.5 minute video in a little over an hour—not bad!). But the proof is in the pudding, so you can judge for yourselves:

Just noticed: Oops, I seem to be the Alt-MBA student of the week! FUN! Thanks, guys!

You know, I had a ball doing this. It was quite challenging to get a video out every day (especially when iMovie crashed and I had to redo all my edits, har har), but it stretched my mad skillz and it was incredibly enjoyable to provide something useful to a bunch of neato motivated people. (And incidentally, doing something like this isn’t that hard—it just takes some time and willingness to traverse the learning curve. If I can do it, you can too!)

Inimitable cameo by Martin Whitmore. ;}

I’ve been playing with the wonderful beta presentation tool at Prezi.com, introduced to me by the ever fantastic Matt Cheney. It allows users to embed video in the presentation, among other amazing things. I’m pretty impressed so far—in fact, I’ll probably let you see what I’m working on a little later on. (Patience, grasshopper.)

But for now—on with my day! (Fourth video tomorrow morning!)

My Toastmasters speech this morning on Fundamental Techniques in Handling People went swimmingly! In continued celebration of the awesomeness of Dale Carnegie, the following video is all about section two of How to Make Friends and Influence People: Six Ways to Make People Like You!

Enjoy. ;}

I’m sure you were wondering where all this was going! The truth is, February 9th began my Alt-MBA book discussion week, and my chosen book was one that means quite a lot to me: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People. (Incidentally, I’m giving my third Toastmasters speech tomorrow morning on the same topic. I hope it goes well!)

As you can see, I have a particular passion for this book because of its history in my family. So when it was time for me to give a presentation, the most logical thing in the world was to do some video! (Hey, I needed some more videoblogging practice anyway!)

In any case, here’s my overview and the first section of the book: Fundamental Techniques in Handling People!

* How to Win Friends & Influence People is here on Amazon (of course), and I highly recommend it.

• More information about the Alt-MBA (a.k.a., Alternative-Alternative MBA or !!MBA): main site, original Squidoo book list page.

I have a confession to make.

I’m a (super) lazy reader.

I have always read very quickly and easily—reading is fun. Reading is a relaxing, soothing activity. It’s like trying to absorb information while sleeping; it’s effortless. This made especial sense when all I read was fiction growing up (sci-fi, fantasy, dragons, witches, magic horses, you got it) but it continued to be the case when I started to educate myself about people, sex, business and the universe. Reading was “work”, but it was still just as easy.

At a certain point my desire for information began to outstrip my reading speed. I tried not to crave information, but it’s so hard! Listen to me whine. I spent more of my time reading, but the books tended to pile up anyway. I stopped buying everything on my list. I started choosing material more carefully, researching reviews, picking up the ones I knew would be really perfect and letting the rest go. This was a great approach, but it has one flaw: What do I do when the really perfect books breed and multiply?

That’s exactly what happened. I couldn’t choose anymore. There were just too many! How much time was I really going to spend reading?

I decided to learn to read faster. I took a photoreading course (after coming across Steve Pavlina’s posts) and was very pleased! I’d never done any sort of speed reading and I loved how fast I could get through nonfiction, even long before having mastered any of the unconscious processing techniques. But there was one problem, and it’s the problem I’m working to solve now: I’m a lazy reader!

For all its awesomeness, photoreading takes effort. Maybe more accomplished photoreaders than I don’t notice the effort, but many of the photoreaders I’ve met came from hating to read. I came from loving to read, and the idea of taking a relaxing activity and turning it into homework is something I can’t help but balk at. Of course, I still read all my fiction the “usual” way—fiction is less suited to photoreading anyhow—but I’m finding it difficult to adjust and use photoreading as my automatic solution, every time. Part of my brain is a little offended that I’m taking this awesome, relaxing work and making it… work.

What the hell? my brain says, indignant. Who do you think you are?

I’ve been mulling this over for a few weeks, and I’ve thought of a few probable solutions. I still photoread quite well (if not perfectly), so all I need to iron out is my motivation.

I speculated recently about starting a super-fast readers club, so that anticipating conversation about many different books in short spans of time would give me a “reason” to read them fast and be ready to discuss. (I’m letting that percolate. Something might come of it. Right now, I’m taking advantage of the Alternative Alternative MBA, and that’s a great “reason”—though maybe we should have another discussion, sometime, about why I feel I need more of a “reason” than just wanting to read the damn book!)

I’m thinking about coming at new books from a direction Seth suggested a few months ago: Use information to do something, not just learn something. This is great because photoreading involves setting a purpose for yourself, information you’re looking for, questions you want to have answered and identifying the most useful parts of the book—and the next step, after finding what you want, is to use it to make something happen. Well, of course! If I start to associate reading with an active approach (instead of with relaxing and getting all the information I want without expending any effort), I may find that my motivation as regards reading changes a lot.

This is all just speculation so far, but you’ll know what it means when I start making posts about books and actions together in the same space, instead of just gushing about my recent reading crush. It’s time for this to happen. I have a hell of a lot of books to get through, but feel free to translate: I have a hell of a lot of change to make.

These books are just as fantastic as I remembered. Spenser is the best fictional dude in the history of fictional dudes. And damn, can that man cook. Also, snippet:

The gun in [Phil’s] hand was an Army issue .45 automatic. It fired a slug about the size of a baseball and at close range would knock down a sex-crazed rhinoceros.

Yeah.