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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Over the years, I’ve coached many of my kids’ sports teams. Here are a few observations: Everybody talks about how seriously kids — and especially their parents — take winning versus losing in sports. Unfortunately, this is largely true. And the most common casualty here is sportsmanship. I don’t succumb to this garbage, and I’m sure you don’t either.

In fact, I have kids “repeat after me” at the first day of practice:

“I

(their name)

promise that I will treat

my fellow players AND our opponents

with respect at all times during this season –

that I will win like a gentleman

and that I will lose like a gentleman.”

And it’s not that I don’t encourage the kids to play hard. There is no reason to act as if sports — or life more generally — is non-competitive, because that’s not true, and you’re serving no one by pretending otherwise. The American Youth Soccer Organization, AYSO, boasts 600,000 players and tens of thousands of volunteer coaches and referees. The emphasis is on fairness, balanced teams, and giving everyone an equal chance to play. It’s as close as you can get to a non-competitive spirit, yet everyone is trying his hardest to win, and it’s a great environment for kids.

One of the tricks in coaching in AYSO is to build a fun and supportive climate while working hard on developing skills that will win games. If you don’t succeed in helping each player improve at least one thing during each practice, they going to get killed in their games, and everybody will have a rotten time.

For those of you who have the opportunity to coach you kids in sports, I urge you to take it. It’s certainly been one of the highlights of my life. And here are two quick stories that I hope will begin to explain the reason I feel this way.

My son Jake was a considerable soccer powerhouse when he was little. In the first game of his under-8 season, he scored three goals in a 3-2 win over an opponent whose dominant player — Paul, as I remember — had scored both their goals. When we walked off the field, I asked Jake if he wanted to say something to Paul. As a coach and as a father, I was lucky enough to hear the brief but poignant conversation. Jake told they boy, who was taking the loss rather hard, “Hey. You’re a good player.” Paul smiled, bowed his head, and replied softly, “Thanks. But you’re better than I am.”

That’s warmth and humility.

Six years later, I coached Jake’s under-14 team — and, as you can imagine, observed a grossly different set of dynamics. Generally, adolescents are more concerned about looking cool than they are about warming up to others. I was lucky enough to have been assigned terrific young men, and when the regular season ended in December, we had the best record, and so were bound for the playoffs — but not until after a two-month hiatus. When I got the kids back for a practice after the break, I asked everyone to sit in a circle. I requested that everyone talk, one at a time, about what he had been up to, what he thought we needed to do to be successful in the playoffs, and so forth. Some kids were shy about this, but most had really good, constructive suggestions. When it came his turn to speak, one boy just sat there and beamed as he looked unhurriedly around the circle at each face. Finally he spoke, “Man,” he said slowly. “It sure is good to see you guys again.”

That’s friendship and trust.

If you know of something that brings any more joy, please let me know.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

In late 2007, I began discussing an idea with a few friends: a series of essays that could be made into a book or a film documentary series—each conceived around a single idea:

We in Western civilization need to broaden our understanding of the world around us. Our processes for exploration and investigation have become so narrow, focused, and specific that we’ve cut ourselves off from a great deal of creative thinking and innovative problem solving. We need to become “Renaissance men and women,” aggressively reversing this trend, and developing our ability to see the world and the challenges we face through a wide variety of different lenses.

At this point, I’d like to offer some of these essays as a blog.

Understanding the Trend toward Specialization

This trend toward specificity has accelerated recently to the point that our current mode of inquiry has become almost exclusively silo-oriented, with our collective know-how splintered into hundreds of tightly confined areas that have little bearing on or communion with one another. An obvious example of this is the workplace, where job functions have taken on incredible levels of detail and specialization—but this phenomenon is by no means limited to our careers.

The cause of the trend is normally identified as the exponential growth in the volume of knowledge available to us all, which has rendered it impossible for anyone to develop and maintain anything more than a surface-level understanding of more than one topic. Though this is unarguably part of the issue, I believe that we’re dealing with something even more fundamental: a change—over the last century or so—in our overall cultural paradigm of thinking and investigation.

This, of course, is not an original idea; in fact, it was the crux of Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, published in 1963. Fuller wrote, “Our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking….We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable….In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others.”

No one can doubt that we as a culture increasingly seek out subject matter experts—in hundreds—probably even thousands of disciplines, to provide better, more specific answers to our questions. This reliance on experts, as Fuller points out, has caused us to back off from “comprehensive” thinking, but worse still, has generated a general apathy in most of us about really understanding the world around us. And it has most certainly affected how most of us go through of our lives—from the colleges we choose, to the majors we select, to the careers we pursue, to the way we look for cures to our ailments, to the books we read.

We’re all familiar with the concept of holistic medicine—the idea that the human organism must be understood as an integral entity—one whose individual “parts”—if they exist as discrete physiological elements at all—do so only through constant interactions with other so-called “parts” to create the incredible complexity we call a human being. The concept of the proposed series is essentially an extension of that idea—that a broadened perspective can be—and needs to be—applied to our lives more generally. Our search for answers to life’s questions and solutions to our problems needs to be defocused, such that it takes into consideration the widest possible breadth of investigation.

The Blog

On this blog, you’ll see brief essays on many dozens of different arenas—spanning, as well as my guests and I are able, the breadth of human discourse. In many cases we‘ll be posing more questions than we purport to answer, but in every case, we’ll aspire to re-open readers’ minds to the great issues that confront is in the sciences as well as the humanities.

I will find it interesting to see if this blog becomes popular. I actually have high hopes, insofar as it is clear that people in general are increasingly aware of the quickening pace of innovation and technology, and rightfully concerned that civilization is not sufficiently wise and circumspect to steer us away from trouble.

I will hope that many of you consider becoming contributing authors. In any case, I look forward to your comments on the essays.

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