The Rawness

If I was to take my writing to the next level and self-publish, what would you most be interested in seeing me write based on what you’ve read of my blog so far? Nonfiction that expands a specific topic I’ve discussed on this blog? Or nonfiction that touches a variety of topics like a collection of essays? A piece of fiction that illustrates the type human behavior principles I tend to discuss? Something else altogether?

Feedback is appreciated. That includes all you lurkers who never comment.

Thanks.

This is a new regular feature I’m doing because I constantly get emails asking what I’m currently reading or the last few books I’ve heard. So whenever I start a new book from now on, I’ll just post it here so that people won’t have to email me to ask anymore.

What I just finished reading:

The Iliad (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

This is the translation of the Iliad done by Robert Fagles. Fagles’ translations are great because rather than just going for literal translation, he kept in mind that books like the Iliad and the Odyssey were originally oral traditions, meant to be performed aloud to audiences. So in his translations, he tried to capture the spirit of the original and create a modern English translation that was rhythmic, captured the swagger, pomp and aggression of the original spoken ancient Greek text, and was suited to being read aloud on a stage.

It flowed so well that I sometimes caught myself reading some of the dramatic passages aloud.

What I’m Reading Now:

Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class by Lawrence Otis Graham. This book was highly controversial when it was first released for violating the omerta of the black upper-class. Black people can be very classist, but because of their history of being discriminated against they are very averse to being outed as classist, hence the whole “keep it real” mentality.

Graham’s book aired the dirty laundry of the black community by showing the level of classism that exists among the little known social registries and elite groups of the black upper class. It’s a level of snobbishness many have no idea exists in the black community. It also discusses things like the “paper bag test” where admission to black social events would be determined by whether your skin color was lighter than the color of a brown paper bag. If it was darker, you couldn’t gain entry.

A description of the book from Graham’s own website:

Debutante cotillions. Million-dollar homes. Summers in Martha?s Vineyard and Sag Harbor. Membership in the Links, Jack and Jill, Deltas, Boule, and AKAs. An obsession with the right schools, families, churches, social clubs, and skin complexion. This is the world of the black upper class and the focus of the first book written about the black elite by a member of this hard-to-penetrate group.

Lawrence Otis Graham?s controversial bestseller, Our Kind of People: Inside America?s Black Upper Class, was selected by the Book of the Month Club and landed on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Essence Magazine. The book traces the history of black America?s well-to-do, going back to the first black millionaires of the 1890s. The detailed book explains why one needs to have more than money and celebrity to be accepted by this exclusive old-guard black elite crowd. One needs to have the right parents, school credentials, fraternity, club memberships, summer house, profession?and in some cases, the right physical features.

Written by a Harvard-educated lawyer who grew up in many of the oldest black elite organizations, Graham is best known for his undercover work as a busboy at an all-white Connecticut country club, where he exposed its social practices of exclusion.
Graham?s controversial book not only profiles some of the most prominent black names and institutions in twelve different U.S. cities, but it also gives the inside scoop on such by-invitation-only black society groups like Jack & Jill, the Links, the Boul?, the Girl Friends and the Guardsmen. After his six years of research, Graham shares information on the right fraternities and sororities, the right black boarding schools, the right black churches in each city, as well as which prominent black families continue to give back to the black community and which now exploit their light complexions to ?pass? as white.
A second-generation alumnus of the Jack & Jill children?s group, a member of the 90 year old Boul? and the son of a Link, Graham offers a perspective that only an insider would have.

I’m only one chapter in so far, but it’s pretty fascinating, and it seems pretty accurate so far. I can also see why so many black people hated this book, as it’s pretty brutally honest about how pervasive ans rampant classism is among educated, well-to-do blacks. Another reason is that while well-to-do blacks take much pride in being superior to the “bad” blacks in the ghetto, there is also a tendency among them to simultaneously feel guilty for their success at times, as if they’re selling out or renouncing their blackness by embracing such lifestyles. A sort of “survivor’s guilt” is the best way to describe it, I’d say.

The table of contents is as follows:

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 The Origins of the Black Upper Class
Chapter 2 Jack and Jill: Where Elite Black Kids Are Separated from the Rest
Chapter 3 The Black Child Experience: The Right Cotillions, Camps, and Private Schools
Chapter 4 Howard, Spelman, and Morehouse: Three Colleges That Count
Chapter 5 The Right Fraternities and Sororities
Chapter 6 The Links and the Girl Friends: For Black Women Who Govern Society
Chapter 7 The Boule, the Guardsmen, and Other Groups for Elite Black Men
Chapter 8 Vacation Spots for the Black Elite
Chapter 9 Black Elite Life in Chicago
Chapter 10 Black Elite Life in Washington, DC
Chapter 11 Black Elite Life in New York City
Chapter 12 Black Elite Life in Memphis
Chapter 13 Black Elite Life in Detroit
Chapter 14 Black Elite Life in Atlanta
Chapter 15 Other cities for the Black Elite: Nashville, New Orleans, Tuskegee,
Los Angeles, Philadelphia
Chapter 16 Passing for White: When the ?Brown Paper Bag Test? Isn?t Enough

Recommended Reading:

Introduction
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Today I’m going to discuss two areas I still have problems with occasionally:

Raise Your Bragging Threshold and Stop Fishing for Compliments

A lot of guys brag and fish for compliments about the flimsiest things. It broadcasts horrible insecurity. No one likes that guy who looks for an excuse to brag about the same story every time you see him.

The level of events you’re willing to brag about or fish for compliments about also becomes the level at which you being to feel disappointment when things go wrong. For example, say you brag when your boss gives you a compliment about your work. By bragging about something so insignificant, you have given that event a strong value in your mind. So now, if that event doesn’t happen, or worse the opposite of the event happens and your boss makes a negative comment about your work, you’ll play it over and over in your head and become despondent. If you fish for compliments about your looks or brag every time someone compliments your looks, you have made such physical recognition a major event in your mind. Now if someone doesn’t compliment your looks, or worse says something negative about your looks, you make a big deal about it and get depressed. If you fish for compliments about your car, you’ll feel like a loser when no one notices your car. If you brag about every time you get a girl’s number, you’ll be depressed whenever you don’t get a number. If you brag about your job title, you’ll get flustered, embarrassed and erratic whenever someone gets it wrong. The lower and more insignificant your bragging threshold, the easier it will be to shake you and throw you off your A-game.

The other thing bragging does is create sticking points. When you brag about an occurrence, you give your subconscious mind the message that something significant and noteworthy has just happened. And as a consequence, you are training yourself to become satisfied with that occurrence whenever it repeats itself. You won’t feel much of a drive to surpass it. For example, when I was young, I would brag about getting numbers. I’d get a phone number and I’d act like I just scored a threesome with Raquel Welch and young Mia Farrow in their prime. I was creating a mindset in myself that phone numbers were a big deal, to the point they subconsciously became my endgame. As a result, once I got a number or two, I’d start to slow down because I already accomplished bragging rights. I subconsciously felt like I did all I needed to do. It wasn’t until I stopped bragging about such silly things and started treating phone numbers as no big deal that my game moved up to the next level.

The Patrick Ewing Knicks were the same way. They’d celebrate after every single basket they made. Patrick Ewing would do a layup and he’d literally be doing pirouettes down the court. Someone would dunk and the whole team would run around like idiots doing chest bumps in the first quarter. As a NY Knicks fan, I found it embarrassing. And unsurprisingly, they’d never win championships. They’d choke a lot. Michael Jordan and Bulls were different. He rarely stopped to celebrate prematurely. A basket was just a basket. He’d make it, maybe smile at most and just move on. He just treated it like the norm and it became commonplace. After a while, he even made championships seem commonplace.

What you are willing to brag about reveals the limits of your past accomplishments, you current ambitions and future expectations. So broadcast that all three of those things are high by raising your bragging threshold accordingly.

Avoid Screening Your Calls As Much As You Can

Society and technology makes it easier than ever to postpone or avoid confrontation. First the answering machine made it easy to screen calls. Then Caller ID made it even easier, as you knew who was calling from the moment the phone started ringing. This was huge for me, and I would screen all my calls for no reason. I would especially screen calls from numbers I didn’t recognize.

What I grew to realize is that the extent to which you screen phone calls is the extent to which things in your life are incongruent and out of whack. When every aspect of your life is in place, from your job performance to your personal finances to your love life to your friendships, you don’t have to screen calls. Think of the times in your life when you were most obsessed with screening phone calls. You were probably juggling multiple women and pretending you weren’t. You were probably bad about paying your bills and had a lot of creditors and collection agencies calling you. You were routinely overpromising and undelivering to friends and employers and as a result had to dodge them until you caught up on the things you promised them. And so on.

Routinely resorting to call screening puts you in a comfort zone where you allow these dysfunctions to never get fixed, or even worsen. That’s why you have to set a goal for yourself to never screen calls again. Now of course there are times when you won’t pick up your phone, like in a public library or a business meeting, but this is not the same as call screening as you would avoid that call no matter who was calling, because the timing is inconvenient and it would be offensive to people around you if you picked up at that moment. That’s fine. It’s the selective avoidance of phone calls you want to eliminate.

When you resolve to not screen phone calls anymore, this is what happens: You find yourself making sure your bills are paid, because if your creditors call, you’re going to be forced to speak to them. You start being honest about what you want from relationships, and you tell women you want to break up with them honestly rather than just avoid their calls until you hope they get a hint. Dodging them is no longer an option. Or you start honestly telling them you don’t want to be exclusive to one woman rather than secretly juggle multiple women. You start underpromising and overdelivering with your personal and professional obligations, because you know you aren’t planning to avoid the consequences later on. You start living with integrity and realizing a lot of people are more understanding than you think. When you take away from yourself the option of dodging future consequences, you suddenly find yourself acting with more character and foresight in your current transactions.

In the old days, avoiding people was harder. Especially because people lived in small towns where everyone knew everyone else, life was much less anonymous, people knew when you were home and would call on you, and people ran into each other more because of engagement in public and civic life (bowling leagues, church, etc.) We have so many elements in our life to create distance, anonymity, isolation and screening that personal accountability has gone out the window. But not for you. Not anymore.

How many cliches can you cram into one promo?

“A hardcore cop who’s a total control freak.” WHOAAAA!!!!

But even crazier, he’s a single dad with a precociously sassy adult-acting daughter with wisecracks!

A longer promo:

“Ray Castle is the bad boy of bestsellers?” Did they seriously just say that without a hint of irony or self-mocking?

I have a crazy notion. I think maybe the two lead characters are going to be total opposites: an uptight control freak who does things by the book, and a wild and crazy wisecracking rake, yet despite their differences they’re going to find…opposites attract! I haven’t seen anything this revolutionary since the show “Bones!”

Seriously, what the fuck? Did ABC commission some screenwriters to just cram as many cliches into a show as humanly possible? Looks like crap. Someone should be punched in the cock full force for inflicting that on the world.

I can’t take credit for coming up with this. I wrote it down after hearing it someplace else. I have a tendency to write down and save any good advice I hear at any time and keep it in a drawer for future reference. These four steps for making decisions are great, but I can’t remember for the life of me where I first encountered them. If anyone recognizes them, please let me know and I’ll edit the post to give credit where it’s due.

1. Ask yourself “What’s the worst that can happen?”
2. Ask yourself “What’s the best that can happen?”
3. Ask yourself “What’s most likely to happen?” (This is the “risk factor”)
4. If the risk factor from step 3 is acceptable to you, than ask yourself “Am I willing to live with the worst case scenario for a shot at the best?”

I know many people will think this sounds too common sense to make a big deal about, but I firmly believe (1) the best advice is often the most basic and common sense advice, and (2) I think common sense is not as common as we like to think it is.

UPDATE:

Mr. Pilkington in the comments says that this four-step evaluation appears in the book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, but doesn’t know if the author came up with it himself or stole it from someone else. I never read the book myself, but I figured it was worth putting in the “Recommended Reading” section below.

If anyone can trace back the source even further, let me know in the comments.

Recommended Reading: