Titanic Mistake
A new book claims that the Titanic had plenty of time to dodge out of the way of the fatal iceberg but the collision was down to a helmsman who turned the ship the wrong way. The granddaughter of Second Officer Charles Lightoller has written the novel, “Good as Gold”, revealing a secret that has been kept by their family for the last 100 years. Lady Louise Patten’s book tells how her grandfather covered up the error in inquires on both sides of the Atlantic fearing that the truth might bankrupt the liner’s owners and put him and his colleagues out of jobs. “The inquiry had to be a whitewash. The only person he told the full story to was his beloved wife Sylvia, my grandmother,” Patten told the Telegraph. “As a teenager, I was enthralled by the Titanic. Granny revealed to me exactly what had happened on that night and we would discuss it endlessly. "She died when I was sixteen and, though she never told me to keep the knowledge to myself, I didn’t tell anyone. "My mother insisted that everything remained strictly inside the family: a hero’s reputation was at stake. "Nearly forty years later, with Granny and my mother long dead, I was plotting my second novel and it struck me that I was the last person alive to know what really happened on the night Titanic sank. "My grandfather’s extraordinary experiences felt like perfect material for “Good As Gold”. ” Until now it was thought that the iceberg was not spotted until it was too late but this book now reveals that the ship steamed straight into the ice mountain because of an error. By the time the error had been realized the side of the ship had been holed and all was lost. Lightoller believed that even the passengers and crew could have been saved if the ship had not been turned to plough directly into the iceberg. She said “It just makes it seem all the more tragic&hellipThey could easily have avoided the iceberg if it wasn't for the blunder." This steering error took place because of simple confusion. During that time seagoing ships were undergoing upheaval because of the conversion from sail to steam ships. They had two different steering systems with different commands attached to each. Essentially they were the exact opposite of each other. One the fateful night, April 14 1912, First Officer William Murdoch spotted an iceberg, two miles away, and shouted “hard a-starboard”. Quartermaster Robert Hitchins misinterpreted the order. He turned the ship right instead of left. Although he was immediately told to correct his mistake it was too late. The starboard bow was ripped to shreds by the iceberg and the icy water flowed into the ship. Lady Patten, who is the wife of former British, Tory Education minister, Lord John Patten, said “The steersman panicked and the real reason why Titanic hit the iceberg, which has never come to light before, is because he turned the wheel the wrong way.” Her grandfather, Lightoller, did not witness what happened on the bridge but was present at the meeting of the four senior officers, which took place in the First Officer’s cabin. He also heard next decision being made. Chairman of the Titanic’s owner, White Star Line, Bruce Ismay convinced the captain to continue “slow ahead” for another ten minutes. This extra ten minutes added to the water flooding the hull and forced it up and over the bulkheads. The Titanic sunk within hours. Lady Patten said “Ismay insisted on keeping going, no doubt fearful of losing his investment and damaging his company’s reputation&hellipThe nearest ship was four hours away. Had she remained at ‘Stop’, it’s probable that Titanic would have floated until help arrived.” Lightoller was the only survivor who knew the truth and he decided to hide what he knew from the world. He felt it his duty to protect White Star Line and his colleagues.
More bacteria on lift buttons than toilet seats
The number of bacteria on a lift button can be significantly higher than on a public toilet seat, the results of a new study indicate.
US researchers collected bacteria samples from hotels, restaurants, banks, offices and airports. They found that the level of bacteria on lift buttons averaged 2,200 colony forming units per square centimeter. On the average public toilet seat, this figure was just eight.
Among the common bacteria found were E.coli and MRSA.
The research was carried out on behalf of Mircoban Europe, which manufactures antibacterial protection products. According to Dr Nicholas Moon of Microban, in a busy building, a lift button can be touched by ‘dozens of different people who will have come into contact with all kinds of bacteria every hour'.
"Even if the buttons are cleaned regularly, the potential for the build up of bacteria is high.
"It is easy to see that in some environments, especially airports and hotels where there are thousands of people from different places regularly touching lift buttons, there could be a major potential point for cross contamination and the spread of disease," he said.
The study was carried out by researchers from the University of Arizona.
Dan Buettner's Blue Zones 9 secrets of a longer life
The red-walled foyer of Dan Buettner's Lake of the Isles home is packed with party guests. Black-clad waiters weave among the revelers, offering up twirls of scallops and skinny pasta spun onto silver forks. In one section of the house, the gossip columnist for the Star Tribune stalks the governor with her video camera.
"Hi, C.J.," says Gov. Tim Pawlenty, the potential GOP presidential candidate, offering an awkward wave.
C.J. has followed Buettner for years—he and former supermodel girlfriend Cheryl Tiegs were frequently the subjects of her gossip column. Tonight, the Minnesota celebrity-hunting is good: Josh Hartnett is scheduled to appear. In the living room, Judge Mary Pawlenty, the governor's wife, in a floral burgundy tunic straight out of Mumbai, chats with the Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn, wearing standard Brooklyn hipster cowboy plaid. Everyone seems amused.
Dressed in a crisp white shirt and dark, well-tailored suit, Buettner, 49, circles the room. His guests have paid $500 to attend this living-room tailgate before the annual Butter Ball, the charity fundraiser Buettner started 20 years ago, which has become a who's-who of Minnesota elite, and he wants to make sure they get their money's worth.
"He works the room as well as the finest of politicians," says Dean Phillips, Buettner's neighbor and the CEO of Phillips Distilling Company. "If there were any babies there, I'm sure he would have held the babies."
Buettner's charm has served him well. It has allowed him to travel the world, set several Guinness records, and investigate the great mysteries of mankind.
Now he has decided to take on his biggest challenge: mortality.
Man has long searched for the fountain of youth, but the results have mostly been snake oil. Still, by 2008 products promising to make people look or feel younger had become a booming $28 billion-a-year U.S. industry, according to the Freedonia Group, a market research firm based in Cleveland.
Buettner says he's found the secret. He visited the ragged cliffs of Sardinia and the fertile gardens of Okinawa—global hotspots of longevity, dubbed Blue Zones—where people live to be 100 at astonishing rates. He identified what they have in common and distilled their secrets into a recipe he says could add a decade to your life.
"I found there's no supplement, there's no herb, there's no one thing that's going to make us live longer in the foreseeable future," Buettner says. "But there are nine little things that will."
IN JANUARY 1982, 21-year-old Danny Buettner traded the ice and snow of Minnesota's winter for the smooth white beaches of St. Thomas in the Caribbean. Then a senior in college, Buettner was throwing back a few cold ones with a buddy at the Island Beachcomber Hotel. It was all on the Star Tribune's dime. Buettner had sold subscriptions to the paper door-to-door so successfully that the newspaper rewarded him with free trips, this time a jaunt for two to the Virgin Islands.
"In quintessential Dan Buettner fashion, he offered to me the opportunity to buy half the trip he won for free," laughs Tom Heuer, the friend who went along. "But it was a hell of a deal—it was $400."
At the bar sat Remar Sutton, a gentleman with a sweet Georgia drawl and flawless decorum, who was down for the winter to manage the hotel.
Sutton introduced himself and the conversation flowed. He regaled the young men with tales of his escapades as a writer and a promoter—his best friend was George Plimpton, the participatory journalist and gadabout.
When Buettner returned to Minnesota, Sutton kept in touch. A year and a half later, he and Plimpton hired Buettner to work on a fundraiser for National Public Radio as the associate producer of a celebrity croquet tournament.
Forty celebrities would play with 40 CEOs at a luxurious Florida development. The merry trio—Buettner, Sutton, and Plimpton—would handle the publicity and coordinate logistics, while the CEOs would finance their year of fun.
For nine months, the men lived like kings—riding around in limousines, staying in the finest hotels, and eating in the best restaurants. They shuttled from Sutton's headquarters in the Bahamas to Plimpton's place in New York.
"George was heavily influenced by the notion that you can do what you love and make a living out of it," Buettner says. "If you're good at universalizing your experiences in an artful way, you can pretty much do what you want to do."
Buettner loved long-distance cycling. So when the croquet gig was up, he planned a bike trip. He figured if he set a Guinness World Record, sponsors would line up to pay his way. He wanted to bike from Minnesota to the tip of Argentina. So he wrote to Guinness: Would they consider such a trip a world record?
"No," the record authorities wrote back.
"But if you start in a place, say, Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, the northern extreme of North America, and bike to the Southern extreme of South America, they would consider it," Buettner recalls. "And I'm like, 'Okay.'"
He spent a year raising money, and in 1986 set out with his brother Steve and four friends to conquer the Americas by bike. Ten months, five days, and 14 hours later, Buettner had cycled 15,500 miles and set a world record.
The accomplishment gave him not only the adventure he craved, but also the platform to build the Dan Buettner brand. People loved his stories of pedaling through Alaskan wilderness and Mexican fishing villages. Buettner milked the public-speaking circuit and found that he could work one day a month and make $900. With a low overhead because he still lived with his parents, that was all the money he needed.
In 1990, Buettner embarked on a second record-setting tour, this time 12,888 miles around the world via the Soviet Union. He wrote a book about the journey, winning a Minnesota Book Award.
By his third trek in 1992, Buettner had passed the age of 30 and wanted his travels to have more existential meaning. South Africa was still gripped by apartheid, so Buettner and his brother Steve decided to cycle the length and width of Africa—12,172 miles—with a multiracial team, including Chip Thomas, an African American doctor. F.W. de Klerk, president of South Africa, said the cyclists would be welcomed with open arms.
The trek across Africa was grueling. The cyclists pedaled for days on washboard roads and rutted mud, sometimes through war zones and often on no more fuel than bananas.
"As we were cycling south through Algeria, we heard all sorts of stories about travelers being kidnapped and killed," Thomas says.
When they reached one South African town, Buettner got off his bike and pulled out his map, as was the team's custom. A group of men circled him. One pulled out a club and whacked Buettner over the head. Buettner fell to the ground but managed to whip out his pepper spray and fend off his attackers. He ran to his bike and pedaled away as fast as he could as the men pelted him with rocks.
"That was scary," Buettner says.
Steve captured the trip and its emotions on a Hi8 camera, and Buettner's team kept in touch with students from 50,000 schools across the country via CNN and newsletter. Teachers used the expedition to teach the children about geography and social studies. Buettner wrote a book and produced an Emmy-winning documentary.
In 1995, Buettner and his brother Steve formed an educational company. Buettner would travel the globe in search of answers to the world's greatest mysteries, and his quests would be beamed into classrooms via satellite and the internet. Schoolchildren could participate in real time by telling the explorers where to go.
Buettner spent the next several years probing the fall of the ancient Maya, exploring humanity's origins in Africa, re-tracing Darwin's route through the Galapagos, and following Marco Polo's trail over the Silk Road. When Buettner sold the company in 1997, he made enough to buy his home on Lake of the Isles, where real estate runs in the millions.
"I do have a charmed life," Buettner says. "I was supposed to be a fireman in Roseville. You know, it's a result of strategic serendipity more than just dumb luck. I think you create your own charm when it comes to life."
IN 1998, Buettner was speaking at an education and technology conference in California when a woman from Japan approached him. Her company wanted him to do an educational quest for schoolchildren in Japan—would he be interested?
Buettner blew her off. But a few weeks later, the woman hopped a plane with three of her colleagues and flew to Minnesota to get Buettner's attention. It worked.
"The first thing I had to do was find an interesting mystery," Buettner recalls. "We looked at ancient bronze-age culture. They were all too esoteric."
Buettner stumbled upon his next obsession when his brother Nick turned up a World Health Organization report that said Okinawa Island had the longest disability-free life expectancy in the world.
"I said, 'That's a good mystery.'"
In the spring of 2000, Buettner stood behind a low-roofed home in the tiny fishing village of Ogimi as 99-year-old Ushi Okushima showed him the herbs growing in her terraced garden. Under her gentle care, ginger, turmeric, and wild onion flourished.
Over steaming cups of green tea shared on tatami mats inside her simple home, Buettner had pestered Ushi to show him her plants. He was convinced that some exotic herb growing innocuously behind the house held the key to Ushi's longevity.
"Yes, I do have longevity foods," Ushi told him.
Now, in the garden, Buettner pointed at a wild-looking herb. "Is this it?"
"No," Ushi said.
"Is this?"
"No, it's in the house, I'll show you later," Ushi said.
She waddled back into the house to the pantry, which held her secret to long life: a can of Spam.
Buettner laughed. Like him, the Spam had come to her all the way from Minnesota.
Everywhere, people were interested in longevity. Buettner could see it in the Web traffic following the Okinawa longevity quest. "It wasn't just kids anymore," he says. "There were dot-coms and dot-nets. So we knew that adults were interested in this."
When Buettner suggested a story on longevity hotspots to an editor at National Geographic, it was greeted with excitement.
"Now there you've got something," the editor said, urging him to do more research.
Buettner contacted Robert Kane, the director of the University of Minnesota's Center on Aging, and floated the idea. Kane was more than happy to help.
"I was excited at that point, because I wanted something that would change children's attitudes about old people," Kane says.
Kane introduced Buettner to the top demographers and scientists at the National Institute on Aging in Washington, D.C. Buettner flew to D.C. to make his pitch. He was rewarded with a $300,000 research grant—and, more importantly, scientific clout. "So I was able to surround the project with really the top names," Buettner says.
A world-renowned demographer told Buettner that Okinawa Island wasn't the world's only longevity hot spot—there was one in Sardinia. If there were going to be two places, American audiences would want a third in their own country, the National Geographic editor reasoned. Buettner's scientific contacts put him in touch with a well-documented longevity hotspot in California.
"The first three Blue Zones, they were found," Buettner says. "I just dug them out."
Now Buettner had the perfect formula: three hotspots of longevity in three countries. He slaved for months rewriting a one-page letter pitching the story to National Geographic, and in the end, the magazine couldn't turn him down.
In 2003, Buettner began his Blue Zone trips. The format for each expedition was the same: The first half was spent talking to every expert who could help him understand the culture's longevity secrets—anthropologists, historians, dieticians, geneticists. "You essentially give the ingredients to the recipe," Buettner says. "What is the profile of the culture—not the individual—that correlates with the longevity?" The second half of each trip was spent finding people who represent each culture's life-prolonging habits. "To tell a story, you need to find a good character," says Buettner.
In Loma Linda, Buettner spent a day with Marge Jetton, a spry, upbeat 101-year-old with a well-ordered pouf of curls. Buettner arranged to meet Marge at the hair salon she has visited every Friday for 20 years. He was supposed to arrive at 8 a.m.
"You're late!" Marge shouted when Buettner stepped into the salon behind schedule.
Half an hour later, Marge's hair freshly done, she and Buettner zipped along Southern California's network of freeways in her mauve Cadillac sedan, on their way to Marge's volunteer appointments. First stop: a retirement home, where she lugged in four bundles of magazines. "The old folks here like to read them and cut out the pictures for crafts," she explained to Buettner.
Marge was a Seventh-Day Adventist, one of thousands living in Loma Linda, a smog-encrusted community halfway between Palm Springs and Los Angeles. The Adventist religion prohibits smoking, drinking alcohol, and eating biblically unclean foods such as pork, Buettner learned. It also discourages consuming other meat, rich foods, caffeinated drinks, and stimulating spices.
Adventists are a highly studied group—from 1976 to 1988, the National Institutes of Health funded a study of 34,000 California Adventists, and a new study is going on now. The earlier study concluded that the average Adventist lives four to ten years longer than the average Californian. Their diet of soybeans, tomatoes, and other fruits lowered their risk of developing certain cancers. Eating whole wheat bread, drinking five glasses of water a day, and consuming four servings of nuts per week reduced their risk of heart disease.
Buettner wove together his visits to Okinawa, Sardinia, and Loma Linda in a lively, fun-to-read story that made the cover of National Geographic. It was an instant sensation, quickly becoming the third best-selling issue in the magazine's history. Buettner did the media circuit on Anderson Cooper, Good Morning America, CNN, Fox.
Buettner's National Geographic story was such a success that he got a book deal to expand on the concept. He continued the search for more hotspots, finding Blue Zones in the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica and the beautiful island Ikaria off the coast of Greece. Buettner's first book, Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who've Lived the Longest, was a New York Times bestseller. It helped that Buettner was embraced by Oprah.
Oprah welcomed Buettner to her show along with her regular guest, Dr. Oz, who had recently accompanied Buettner to Nicoya to see the Blue Zone concept firsthand. Among the lessons for Winfrey's audience: the importance of getting up off the couch.
"You know, most Americans don't really exercise. A very small proportion," Buettner told Oprah. "But in Nicoya, they'll be making lunch and it's like doing 25 reps with the free weights."
WHILE BUETTNER WAS researching a new book—on "how you set up your life so that you can live longer without even thinking about it"—he began thinking about how to bring the Blue Zones lessons to a real community.
Buettner called everyone he knew in the public health field, looking for models. "Lo and behold, there's none of them," Buettner says. So he started thinking about how to do it himself.
He met with Nancy Graham, editor of AARP Magazine, who was also interested in doing a city health makeover. Buettner presented his ideas to United Health Foundation, which kicked in $750,000 toward the $1 million project. He asked Leslie Lytle, a community health behavior expert at the University of Minnesota, to co-direct the project, and hired Joel Spoonheim, a former planner, to run the daily operations.
With the funding in place, Buettner and his team had to choose a city. The University of Minnesota helped Spoonheim come up with the criteria: It had to be a statistically normal town that fit the national average for health indicators like cardiovascular disease and obesity, it had to be a freestanding town of 10,000 to 20,000, and it had to be within driving distance of the Twin Cities. Fifteen Minnesota cities met the criteria. Once Spoonheim ruled out college towns, 10 cities were left in the running.
Spoonheim called each of the towns and pitched the idea: Did they want to be America's first pre-fab Blue Zone city? Spoonheim gave applications to the three most enthusiastic. Then it was down to which city had the strongest commitment to the project.
On Christmas Eve, 2008, Spoonheim made a phone call. Buettner and his team had decided where to create America's first intentional Blue Zone: In Albert Lea, a picturesque community of about 18,000 souls about an hour and a half south of Minneapolis.
In January 2009, Dan Burden, a Florida native bundled in four layers under his winter coat, stepped out of a bus alongside a snow bank edging a road just outside of downtown Albert Lea. The temperature was -53 degrees. As a group of city officials and Buettner's team looked on, shivering, Burden stamped his feet for warmth and pointed at the ground. This was a great place for a sidewalk, he explained, the hot steam of his breath vanishing rapidly into the frigid air.
Burden was the first of four expert consultants called on to make over the town. By the end of his two-day visit, the city was shuffling its budgets to find money for a walking path around Fountain Lake, the town's central jewel.
As winter gave way to spring, Buettner's team launched several initiatives. They divided the Blue Zone's nine life lessons into four categories—move naturally, eat wisely, right outlook, and connect—and came up with ways for the town to adopt the changes with relative ease. Lytle worked with the school districts to revise their nutritional programs. Spoonheim assisted locally owned grocery stores in creating signs to identify healthy foods and recruited restaurants to make changes to menus.
On May 14, the auditorium of the high school gym filled with the kick-off celebration of the Vitality Project in Albert Lea. The high school cheer squad and drum line welcomed residents into the gym. A cadre of 150 volunteers clad in blue T-shirts handed out welcome packets. Dr. Brian Wansink, head of the Food Lab at Cornell University, introduced the Blue Zone concept and ways to get involved. Then residents visited booths and signed pledges.
Throughout the summer, Albert Lea put those pledges into practice. Groups of neighbors joined walking moais, meeting regularly to walk and talk. Albert Lea residents took cooking classes, planted food in community gardens, and learned how to find their purpose through a series of workshops.
By October, close to 20 percent of Albert Lea's residents had participated in the Vitality Project. An online questionnaire helped 786 residents determine their before-and-after life expectancies, which rose by an average of 2.9 years. City workers and their families lowered their health care costs by 32 percent in 10 months.
For Brian Mattson, a 39-year-old social worker, the Vitality Project launched a new way of life. Overweight by 150 pounds, Mattson typically spent evenings alone in his home, watching television and eating entire bags of Doritos. When his mom dragged him to the Vitality Project kick-off, he committed to walking with his neighbors.
"Pretty soon you start doing it regularly," Mattson says, adding that more changes then seemed possible. "It became: 'I'll eat more fruits and vegetables.'"
Now Mattson has lost 30 pounds, and he's starting to work on his social connections. Recently, he played a small part in a local theater production—something he used to love but had let fall by the wayside for nearly a decade.
Though Buettner recommends making no more than three changes at a time, the Furland family—Sue and Bob, both in their 40s, and their sons Tom, 16, and Tim, 14—decided to adopt all the changes. They planted a garden in their backyard, joined walking moais, renewed their commitments to church and volunteer activities, and consumed less meat and more grains and nuts.
"People just felt together on something," Bob says of the community response. "Everybody that was involved seemed happier when you'd go to the events."
DAN BUETTNER STRIDES into Caribou Coffee in Uptown, dressed in yuppie yogi gear: black T-shirt emblazoned with a neon Buddha, zip-up fleece bearing the insignia of lululemon athletica—the brand favored by wealthy women who do Bikram. Despite his book's admonition to show up early, Buettner arrives late—he couldn't find a parking spot.
The coffee shop is Buettner's frequent morning office, where he sweats away over the keyboard on the manuscript for his forthcoming book on happiness. Here, the coffee barista greets him by name. He orders the new hot cocoa, the one with real, rich chocolate pieces melted into milk. It's not exactly on the Blue Zones meal plan, but Buettner likes to try new things.
He carries his paper cup to a big wooden table by the front window and takes a seat. As the talk turns to his project in Albert Lea, Buettner flips open his laptop and brings up the stats from the life expectancy survey.
In a chair nearby, a 30-something man overhears. His ears perk up. He leans over and addresses Buettner.
"Hey, man, I just started following you on Twitter."
Buettner looks up, a little startled, and smiles.
"Oh," he says. "Who knows where that will lead?" He smiles. "But thanks."
Buettner's big project now is taking his Blue Zones to more cities. Already, several cities are interested in being the sites of the makeover, and a health reform corporation called Healthways has signed on as a partner.
"I've made my career out of making discoveries and making those discoveries interesting to the general population. I like doing that," Buettner says. "You can walk up a hillside and get to the top and see a beautiful sunset, but it's better if you discover that and you're with somebody else.
"I have a thrill out of recognizing something and saying, 'Isn't this amazing,'" Buettner says. "I get to do it by a factor of 10 million." The Power of Nine
Buettner's "nine little things" aren't exactly groundbreaking. In fact, what Buettner uncovered in his global pursuit of the fountain of youth turned out to be well-established medical principles that doctors and social scientists have known about for years. Buettner's real contribution is in distilling the wisdom of traditional cultures into easy-to-follow steps—he calls them the Power Nine.
Move naturally
When he was traveling with Buettner in Okinawa, Greg Plotnikoff, medical director of Abbott Northwestern's integrative medicine program, was impressed with the agility of a woman in her late 80s who served her visitors green tea.
"She comes out of the kitchen area carrying a tray—on it is a beautiful teapot and teacups—and with minimal effort, carrying this tray with hot boiling water and beautiful pottery, with no assistance, she lowers herself to the floor," Plotnikoff says. "Balance and strength and flexibility were built into her daily life."
Buettner recommends finding a physical activity you like, setting a date with a friend to do it together, and making movement a regular part of your life.
Hara hachi bu
The Confucian-inspired Okinawan saying means, roughly, eat until you're 80 percent full. That's not a diet strategy—it's a way of life. Rather than stop eating once they are full, as most Americans do, Okinawans stop eating once they are no longer hungry.
Using smaller plates and tall, thin glasses makes portions seem bigger and is an effective way to painlessly cut overeating, according to Wansink, the food expert. Wansink also recommends eating slowly, savoring each bite.
Eat a plant-based diet
Strict Adventists avoid meat entirely. Sardinians and Okinawans enjoy it only occasionally—at festivals and special celebrations. Studies have shown that vegetarianism is associated with longevity.
Worried about getting enough protein? Actually, adults over age 19 only need about 0.8 grams of protein for every 2.2 lbs. of body weight—or about 1.8 to 2.8 ounces per day, according to Lytle. And there is plenty of iron in fortified grains.
To live like the people of Sardinia, Loma Linda, and Okinawa, Buettner recommends making beans and tofu the centerpieces of meals, eating four to six servings of vegetables per day, and adding nuts to your daily intake.
Bottoms up
Okinawans enjoy sake. The shepherds of Sardinia drink wine made from Cannonau grapes. About a glass or two a day is right—any more than that will bring negative consequences that offset the health benefits of moderate drinking.
Find your purpose
Okinawans call it ikigai, Nicoyans call it plan de vida. Richard Leider, world-renowned expert on finding meaning in life, calls it "the reason to get up in the morning."
"It's not just a nice-to-have thing," says Leider. "Purpose is the golden thread that holds the other factors in vitality together—health, wellness, diet, exercise."
To find your purpose, Leider recommends asking yourself some basic questions.
"What are your gifts?" he says. "What are your passions—what do you care about? What are your values—what are environments you want to be working in? Gifts plus passions plus values equals calling or purpose."
De-stress
Adventists have a ready-made de-stressor called the Sabbath. They don't do work or organized sports or homework those days. Instead, they spend time with their families, creating a sense of closeness and balance.
To lower stress in your own life, Buettner recommends reducing noise in the home by turning off the television or radio. Aim to arrive to appointments 15 minutes early—it helps cut anxiety and creates a cushion for traffic and parking time. And start a meditation practice of at least 10 minutes a day, eventually working up to 30 minutes.
Get spiritual
If you already attend a church or spiritual center, renew your commitment by becoming more involved. If organized religion's not for you, you might consider humanist groups, like Unitarian Universalism.
Family first
Sardinians would be ashamed to place their elders in a retirement home. Okinawans pray to their ancestors each day. People who center their lives on family are generally happier, Buettner says. Create rituals and spend time together.
Find your people
Studies show that people become like one another as they spend time together. So surround yourself with people who are committed to you and who support your healthy choices. Be likeable. Identify your inner circle and invest in those friendships—find a regular time to meet and share your lives.
New stem-cell technique uses skin cells, mimics embryonic stem cells
Researchers in Boston have announced the discovery of a technique that can convert ordinary human skin cells into cells that are functionally identical to embryonic stem cells. Early results from the new technique, reported by scientists at Children’s Hospital in Boston, show success in producing new cells that can be developed into any other type of tissue for the human body. These cells could potentially replace embryonic stem cells, which have been used by scientists for the same purpose.
Later
What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?
by James Surowiecki
October 11, 2010
Procrastination interests philosophers because of its underlying irrationality.
Some years ago, the economist George Akerlof found himself faced with a simple task: mailing a box of clothes from India, where he was living, to the United States. The clothes belonged to his friend and colleague Joseph Stiglitz, who had left them behind when visiting, so Akerlof was eager to send the box off. But there was a problem. The combination of Indian bureaucracy and what Akerlof called “my own ineptitude in such matters” meant that doing so was going to be a hassle—indeed, he estimated that it would take an entire workday. So he put off dealing with it, week after week. This went on for more than eight months, and it was only shortly before Akerlof himself returned home that he managed to solve his problem: another friend happened to be sending some things back to the U.S., and Akerlof was able to add Stiglitz’s clothes to the shipment. Given the vagaries of intercontinental mail, it’s possible that Akerlof made it back to the States before Stiglitz’s shirts did.
There’s something comforting about this story: even Nobel-winning economists procrastinate! Many of us go through life with an array of undone tasks, large and small, nibbling at our conscience. But Akerlof saw the experience, for all its familiarity, as mysterious. He genuinely intended to send the box to his friend, yet, as he wrote, in a paper called “Procrastination and Obedience” (1991), “each morning for over eight months I woke up and decided that the next morning would be the day to send the Stiglitz box.” He was always about to send the box, but the moment to act never arrived. Akerlof, who became one of the central figures in behavioral economics, came to the realization that procrastination might be more than just a bad habit. He argued that it revealed something important about the limits of rational thinking and that it could teach useful lessons about phenomena as diverse as substance abuse and savings habits. Since his essay was published, the study of procrastination has become a significant field in academia, with philosophers, psychologists, and economists all weighing in.
Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author’s own problems with finishing the piece. (This article will be no exception.) But the academic buzz around the subject isn’t just a case of eggheads rationalizing their slothfulness. As various scholars argue in “The Thief of Time,” edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D. White (Oxford; $65)—a collection of essays on procrastination, ranging from the resolutely theoretical to the surprisingly practical—the tendency raises fundamental philosophical and psychological issues. You may have thought, the last time you blew off work on a presentation to watch “How I Met Your Mother,” that you were just slacking. But from another angle you were actually engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time. Indeed, one essay, by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is “as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”
Ainslie is probably right that procrastination is a basic human impulse, but anxiety about it as a serious problem seems to have emerged in the early modern era. The term itself (derived from a Latin word meaning “to put off for tomorrow”) entered the English language in the sixteenth century, and, by the eighteenth, Samuel Johnson was describing it as “one of the general weaknesses” that “prevail to a greater or less degree in every mind,” and lamenting the tendency in himself: “I could not forbear to reproach myself for having so long neglected what was unavoidably to be done, and of which every moment’s idleness increased the difficulty.” And the problem seems to be getting worse all the time. According to Piers Steel, a business professor at the University of Calgary, the percentage of people who admitted to difficulties with procrastination quadrupled between 1978 and 2002. In that light, it’s possible to see procrastination as the quintessential modern problem.
It’s also a surprisingly costly one. Each year, Americans waste hundreds of millions of dollars because they don’t file their taxes on time. The Harvard economist David Laibson has shown that American workers have forgone huge amounts of money in matching 401(k) contributions because they never got around to signing up for a retirement plan. Seventy per cent of patients suffering from glaucoma risk blindness because they don’t use their eyedrops regularly. Procrastination also inflicts major costs on businesses and governments. The recent crisis of the euro was exacerbated by the German government’s dithering, and the decline of the American auto industry, exemplified by the bankruptcy of G.M., was due in part to executives’ penchant for delaying tough decisions. (In Alex Taylor’s recent history of G.M., “Sixty to Zero,” one of the key conclusions is “Procrastination doesn’t pay.”)
Philosophers are interested in procrastination for another reason. It’s a powerful example of what the Greeks called akrasia—doing something against one’s own better judgment. Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off. In other words, if you’re simply saying “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” you’re not really procrastinating. Knowingly delaying because you think that’s the most efficient use of your time doesn’t count, either. The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy. In one study, sixty-five per cent of students surveyed before they started working on a term paper said they would like to avoid procrastinating: they knew both that they wouldn’t do the work on time and that the delay would make them unhappy.
Most of the contributors to the new book agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time—in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting.” A two-stage experiment provides a classic illustration: In the first stage, people are offered the choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow; in the second stage, they choose between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In substance, the two choices are identical: wait an extra day, get an extra ten bucks. Yet, in the first stage many people choose to take the smaller sum immediately, whereas in the second they prefer to wait one more day and get the extra ten bucks. In other words, hyperbolic discounters are able to make the rational choice when they’re thinking about the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. A similar phenomenon is at work in an experiment run by a group including the economist George Loewenstein, in which people were asked to pick one movie to watch that night and one to watch at a later date. Not surprisingly, for the movie they wanted to watch immediately, people tended to pick lowbrow comedies and blockbusters, but when asked what movie they wanted to watch later they were more likely to pick serious, important films. The problem, of course, is that when the time comes to watch the serious movie, another frothy one will often seem more appealing. This is why Netflix queues are filled with movies that never get watched: our responsible selves put “Hotel Rwanda” and “The Seventh Seal” in our queue, but when the time comes we end up in front of a rerun of “The Hangover.”
The lesson of these experiments is not that people are shortsighted or shallow but that their preferences aren’t consistent over time. We want to watch the Bergman masterpiece, to give ourselves enough time to write the report properly, to set aside money for retirement. But our desires shift as the long run becomes the short run.
Why does this happen? One common answer is ignorance. Socrates believed that akrasia was, strictly speaking, impossible, since we could not want what is bad for us; if we act against our own interests, it must be because we don’t know what’s right. Loewenstein, similarly, is inclined to see the procrastinator as led astray by the “visceral” rewards of the present. As the nineteenth-century Scottish economist John Rae put it, “The prospects of future good, which future years may hold on us, seem at such a moment dull and dubious, and are apt to be slighted, for objects on which the daylight is falling strongly, and showing us in all their freshness just within our grasp.” Loewenstein also suggests that our memory for the intensity of visceral rewards is deficient: when we put off preparing for that meeting by telling ourselves that we’ll do it tomorrow, we fail to take into account that tomorrow the temptation to put off work will be just as strong.
Ignorance might also affect procrastination through what the social scientist Jon Elster calls “the planning fallacy.” Elster thinks that people underestimate the time “it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it has taken them to complete similar projects in the past and partly because they rely on smooth scenarios in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur.” When I was writing this piece, for instance, I had to take my car into the shop, I had to take two unanticipated trips, a family member fell ill, and so on. Each of these events was, strictly speaking, unexpected, and each took time away from my work. But they were really just the kinds of problems you predictably have to deal with in everyday life. Pretending I wouldn’t have any interruptions to my work was a typical illustration of the planning fallacy.
Still, ignorance can’t be the whole story. In the first place, we often procrastinate not by doing fun tasks but by doing jobs whose only allure is that they aren’t what we should be doing. My apartment, for instance, has rarely looked tidier than it does at the moment. And people do learn from experience: procrastinators know all too well the allures of the salient present, and they want to resist them. They just don’t. A magazine editor I know, for instance, once had a writer tell her at noon on a Wednesday that the time-sensitive piece he was working on would be in her in-box by the time she got back from lunch. She did eventually get the piece—the following Tuesday. So a fuller explanation of procrastination really needs to take account of our attitudes to the tasks being avoided. A useful example can be found in the career of General George McClellan, who led the Army of the Potomac during the early years of the Civil War and was one of the greatest procrastinators of all time. When he took charge of the Union army, McClellan was considered a military genius, but he soon became famous for his chronic hesitancy. In 1862, despite an excellent opportunity to take Richmond from Robert E. Lee’s men, with another Union army attacking in a pincer move, he dillydallied, convinced that he was blocked by hordes of Confederate soldiers, and missed his chance. Later that year, both before and after Antietam, he delayed again, squandering a two-to-one advantage over Lee’s troops. Afterward, Union General-in-Chief Henry Halleck wrote, “There is an immobility here that exceeds all that any man can conceive of. It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert mass.”
McClellan’s “immobility” highlights several classic reasons we procrastinate. Although when he took over the Union army he told Lincoln “I can do it all,” he seems to have been unsure that he could do anything. He was perpetually imploring Lincoln for new weapons, and, in the words of one observer, “he felt he never had enough troops, well enough trained or equipped.” Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a vicious cycle. McClellan was also given to excessive planning, as if only the ideal battle plan were worth acting on. Procrastinators often succumb to this sort of perfectionism.
Viewed this way, procrastination starts to look less like a question of mere ignorance than like a complex mixture of weakness, ambition, and inner conflict. But some of the philosophers in “The Thief of Time” have a more radical explanation for the gap between what we want to do and what we end up doing: the person who makes plans and the person who fails to carry them out are not really the same person: they’re different parts of what the game theorist Thomas Schelling called “the divided self.” Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves not as unified selves but as different beings, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control. Ian McEwan evokes this state in his recent novel “Solar”: “At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy.” Similarly, Otto von Bismarck said, “Faust complained about having two souls in his breast, but I harbor a whole crowd of them and they quarrel. It is like being in a republic.” In that sense, the first step to dealing with procrastination isn’t admitting that you have a problem. It’s admitting that your “you”s have a problem.
If identity is a collection of competing selves, what does each of them represent? The easy answer is that one represents your short-term interests (having fun, putting off work, and so on), while another represents your long-term goals. But, if that’s the case, it’s not obvious how you’d ever get anything done: the short-term self, it seems, would always win out. The philosopher Don Ross offers a persuasive solution to the problem. For Ross, the various parts of the self are all present at once, constantly competing and bargaining with one another—one that wants to work, one that wants to watch television, and so on. The key, for Ross, is that although the television-watching self is interested only in watching TV, it’s interested in watching TV not just now but also in the future. This means that it can be bargained with: working now will let you watch more television down the road. Procrastination, in this reading, is the result of a bargaining process gone wrong.
The idea of the divided self, though discomfiting to some, can be liberating in practical terms, because it encourages you to stop thinking about procrastination as something you can beat by just trying harder. Instead, we should rely on what Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson, in their essay in “The Thief of Time,” call “the extended will”—external tools and techniques to help the parts of our selves that want to work. A classic illustration of the extended will at work is Ulysses’ decision to have his men bind him to the mast of his ship. Ulysses knows that when he hears the Sirens he will be too weak to resist steering the ship onto the rocks in pursuit of them, so he has his men bind him, thereby forcing him to adhere to his long-term aims. Similarly, Thomas Schelling once said that he would be willing to pay extra in advance for a hotel room without a television in it. Today, problem gamblers write contracts with casinos banning them from the premises. And people who are trying to lose weight or finish a project will sometimes make bets with their friends so that if they don’t deliver on their promise it’ll cost them money. In 2008, a Ph.D. candidate at Chapel Hill wrote software that enables people to shut off their access to the Internet for up to eight hours; the program, called Freedom, now has an estimated seventy-five thousand users.
Not everyone in “The Thief of Time” approves of the reliance on the extended will. Mark D. White advances an idealist argument rooted in Kantian ethics: recognizing procrastination as a failure of will, we should seek to strengthen the will rather than relying on external controls that will allow it to atrophy further. This isn’t a completely fruitless task: much recent research suggests that will power is, in some ways, like a muscle and can be made stronger. The same research, though, also suggests that most of us have a limited amount of will power and that it’s easily exhausted. In one famous study, people who had been asked to restrain themselves from readily available temptation—in this case, a pile of chocolate-chip cookies that they weren’t allowed to touch—had a harder time persisting in a difficult task than people who were allowed to eat the cookies.
Given this tendency, it makes sense that we often rely intuitively on external rules to help ourselves out. A few years ago, Dan Ariely, a psychologist at M.I.T., did a fascinating experiment examining one of the most basic external tools for dealing with procrastination: deadlines. Students in a class were assigned three papers for the semester, and they were given a choice: they could set separate deadlines for when they had to hand in each of the papers or they could hand them all in together at the end of the semester. There was no benefit to handing the papers in early, since they were all going to be graded at semester’s end, and there was a potential cost to setting the deadlines, since if you missed a deadline your grade would be docked. So the rational thing to do was to hand in all the papers at the end of the semester; that way you’d be free to write the papers sooner but not at risk of a penalty if you didn’t get around to it. Yet most of the students chose to set separate deadlines for each paper, precisely because they knew that they were otherwise unlikely to get around to working on the papers early, which meant they ran the risk of not finishing all three by the end of the semester. This is the essence of the extended will: instead of trusting themselves, the students relied on an outside tool to make themselves do what they actually wanted to do.
Beyond self-binding, there are other ways to avoid dragging your feet, most of which depend on what psychologists might call reframing the task in front of you. Procrastination is driven, in part, by the gap between effort (which is required now) and reward (which you reap only in the future, if ever). So narrowing that gap, by whatever means necessary, helps. Since open-ended tasks with distant deadlines are much easier to postpone than focussed, short-term projects, dividing projects into smaller, more defined sections helps. That’s why David Allen, the author of the best-selling time-management book “Getting Things Done,” lays great emphasis on classification and definition: the vaguer the task, or the more abstract the thinking it requires, the less likely you are to finish it. One German study suggests that just getting people to think about concrete problems (like how to open a bank account) makes them better at finishing their work—even when it deals with a completely different subject. Another way of making procrastination less likely is to reduce the amount of choice we have: often when people are afraid of making the wrong choice they end up doing nothing. So companies might be better off offering their employees fewer investment choices in their 401(k) plans, and making signing up for the plan the default option.
It’s hard to ignore the fact that all these tools are at root about imposing limits and narrowing options—in other words, about a voluntary abnegation of freedom. (Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing.) But before we rush to overcome procrastination we should consider whether it is sometimes an impulse we should heed. The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.” In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too, is to figure out which is which. ¦
London theatre-goers to be invited to Barbican sleepover
Arts lovers heading to London next summer are to be offered the chance to fall asleep at the theatre without being considered rude or uncultured.The latest eyebrow-raising show due to be staged at the vibrant Barbican centre, in the heart of the City of London, Lullaby will run for the whole of June 2011.As well as actors taking to the stage to tell stories and sing soothing songs, the experimental work will also see the Barbican's Pit Theatre transformed into a giant bedroom, complete with en-suite bathroom cubicles.To add to the experience, audience members will be asked to bring their own pyjamas to change into, while the price of a ticket will also include breakfast the morning after.Explaining the thinking behind Lullaby, producer Simon Casson said: "Every time I go to the theatre I fall asleep, so I thought why don't we embrace that idea and make a show that deliberately sends people to sleep?"Over the autumn 2010 season, meanwhile, the Barbican will stage shows such as Macbeth, Dance in the City and the Bicycle Film Festival.
Britain's famous parliament clock tower, Big Ben, is to be renamed Elizabeth Tower in honour of the Queen's diamond jubilee, officials announced on Tuesday.
The change comes after dozens of British politicians signed up to a campaign to change the name of the tower - officially named the Clock Tower but commonly known as Big Ben - in celebration of Queen Elizabeth II's 60th year on the throne.
Big Ben is technically the name of the huge bell at the top of the 96-metre tower, one of London's best-loved landmarks.
"The House of Commons Commission welcomed the proposal to rename the Clock Tower in recognition of The Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and will arrange for this decision to be implemented in an appropriate manner in due course," a spokesman said.
Politicians have accepted that the iconic tower, which sounds out the hours over central London with distinctive "bongs", will continue to be known colloquially as Big Ben.
The change mirrors an honour bestowed on queen Victoria - the only other British monarch to celebrate a diamond jubilee back in 1897 - who gives her name to the other tower at the west end of parliament.
A spokesman for prime minister David Cameron said the name change was "a fitting tribute to the Queen and the service she has given to our country in this jubilee year".
In January, politicians met to discuss how to manage a 0.26 degree tilt to the tower, which looms over the 19-century gothic revival parliament.
The tilt to the north-west has increased very slightly since 2003, although an expert study found it was unlikely to be a problem for 10,000 years.
There are two competing theories of how the bell came to be known as Big Ben.
The most likely explanation is that it was named after Benjamin Hall, the engineer whose name is inscribed on the bell, but some believe it is named after Ben Caunt, a champion heavyweight boxer of the 1850s.
Britain held four days of jubilee celebrations at the beginning of June, including a spectacular 1,000-boat pageant on the River Thames and a star-studded concert at Buckingham Palace.
The monarch and her husband Prince Philip are in Northern Ireland on Tuesday and Wednesday as part of a nationwide jubilee tour, while other royals are travelling the globe.
A new book claims that the Titanic had plenty of time to dodge out of the way of the fatal iceberg but the collision was down to a helmsman who turned the ship the wrong way. The granddaughter of Second Officer Charles Lightoller has written the novel, “Good as Gold”, revealing a secret that has been kept by their family for the last 100 years. Lady Louise Patten’s book tells how her grandfather covered up the error in inquires on both sides of the Atlantic fearing that the truth might bankrupt the liner’s owners and put him and his colleagues out of jobs. “The inquiry had to be a whitewash. The only person he told the full story to was his beloved wife Sylvia, my grandmother,” Patten told the Telegraph. “As a teenager, I was enthralled by the Titanic. Granny revealed to me exactly what had happened on that night and we would discuss it endlessly. "She died when I was sixteen and, though she never told me to keep the knowledge to myself, I didn’t tell anyone. "My mother insisted that everything remained strictly inside the family: a hero’s reputation was at stake. "Nearly forty years later, with Granny and my mother long dead, I was plotting my second novel and it struck me that I was the last person alive to know what really happened on the night Titanic sank. "My grandfather’s extraordinary experiences felt like perfect material for “Good As Gold”. ” Until now it was thought that the iceberg was not spotted until it was too late but this book now reveals that the ship steamed straight into the ice mountain because of an error. By the time the error had been realized the side of the ship had been holed and all was lost. Lightoller believed that even the passengers and crew could have been saved if the ship had not been turned to plough directly into the iceberg. She said “It just makes it seem all the more tragic&hellipThey could easily have avoided the iceberg if it wasn't for the blunder." This steering error took place because of simple confusion. During that time seagoing ships were undergoing upheaval because of the conversion from sail to steam ships. They had two different steering systems with different commands attached to each. Essentially they were the exact opposite of each other. One the fateful night, April 14 1912, First Officer William Murdoch spotted an iceberg, two miles away, and shouted “hard a-starboard”. Quartermaster Robert Hitchins misinterpreted the order. He turned the ship right instead of left. Although he was immediately told to correct his mistake it was too late. The starboard bow was ripped to shreds by the iceberg and the icy water flowed into the ship. Lady Patten, who is the wife of former British, Tory Education minister, Lord John Patten, said “The steersman panicked and the real reason why Titanic hit the iceberg, which has never come to light before, is because he turned the wheel the wrong way.” Her grandfather, Lightoller, did not witness what happened on the bridge but was present at the meeting of the four senior officers, which took place in the First Officer’s cabin. He also heard next decision being made. Chairman of the Titanic’s owner, White Star Line, Bruce Ismay convinced the captain to continue “slow ahead” for another ten minutes. This extra ten minutes added to the water flooding the hull and forced it up and over the bulkheads. The Titanic sunk within hours. Lady Patten said “Ismay insisted on keeping going, no doubt fearful of losing his investment and damaging his company’s reputation&hellipThe nearest ship was four hours away. Had she remained at ‘Stop’, it’s probable that Titanic would have floated until help arrived.” Lightoller was the only survivor who knew the truth and he decided to hide what he knew from the world. He felt it his duty to protect White Star Line and his colleagues.
More bacteria on lift buttons than toilet seats
The number of bacteria on a lift button can be significantly higher than on a public toilet seat, the results of a new study indicate.
US researchers collected bacteria samples from hotels, restaurants, banks, offices and airports. They found that the level of bacteria on lift buttons averaged 2,200 colony forming units per square centimeter. On the average public toilet seat, this figure was just eight.
Among the common bacteria found were E.coli and MRSA.
The research was carried out on behalf of Mircoban Europe, which manufactures antibacterial protection products. According to Dr Nicholas Moon of Microban, in a busy building, a lift button can be touched by ‘dozens of different people who will have come into contact with all kinds of bacteria every hour'.
"Even if the buttons are cleaned regularly, the potential for the build up of bacteria is high.
"It is easy to see that in some environments, especially airports and hotels where there are thousands of people from different places regularly touching lift buttons, there could be a major potential point for cross contamination and the spread of disease," he said.
The study was carried out by researchers from the University of Arizona.
Dan Buettner's Blue Zones 9 secrets of a longer life
The red-walled foyer of Dan Buettner's Lake of the Isles home is packed with party guests. Black-clad waiters weave among the revelers, offering up twirls of scallops and skinny pasta spun onto silver forks. In one section of the house, the gossip columnist for the Star Tribune stalks the governor with her video camera.
"Hi, C.J.," says Gov. Tim Pawlenty, the potential GOP presidential candidate, offering an awkward wave.
C.J. has followed Buettner for years—he and former supermodel girlfriend Cheryl Tiegs were frequently the subjects of her gossip column. Tonight, the Minnesota celebrity-hunting is good: Josh Hartnett is scheduled to appear. In the living room, Judge Mary Pawlenty, the governor's wife, in a floral burgundy tunic straight out of Mumbai, chats with the Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn, wearing standard Brooklyn hipster cowboy plaid. Everyone seems amused.
Dressed in a crisp white shirt and dark, well-tailored suit, Buettner, 49, circles the room. His guests have paid $500 to attend this living-room tailgate before the annual Butter Ball, the charity fundraiser Buettner started 20 years ago, which has become a who's-who of Minnesota elite, and he wants to make sure they get their money's worth.
"He works the room as well as the finest of politicians," says Dean Phillips, Buettner's neighbor and the CEO of Phillips Distilling Company. "If there were any babies there, I'm sure he would have held the babies."
Buettner's charm has served him well. It has allowed him to travel the world, set several Guinness records, and investigate the great mysteries of mankind.
Now he has decided to take on his biggest challenge: mortality.
Man has long searched for the fountain of youth, but the results have mostly been snake oil. Still, by 2008 products promising to make people look or feel younger had become a booming $28 billion-a-year U.S. industry, according to the Freedonia Group, a market research firm based in Cleveland.
Buettner says he's found the secret. He visited the ragged cliffs of Sardinia and the fertile gardens of Okinawa—global hotspots of longevity, dubbed Blue Zones—where people live to be 100 at astonishing rates. He identified what they have in common and distilled their secrets into a recipe he says could add a decade to your life.
"I found there's no supplement, there's no herb, there's no one thing that's going to make us live longer in the foreseeable future," Buettner says. "But there are nine little things that will."
IN JANUARY 1982, 21-year-old Danny Buettner traded the ice and snow of Minnesota's winter for the smooth white beaches of St. Thomas in the Caribbean. Then a senior in college, Buettner was throwing back a few cold ones with a buddy at the Island Beachcomber Hotel. It was all on the Star Tribune's dime. Buettner had sold subscriptions to the paper door-to-door so successfully that the newspaper rewarded him with free trips, this time a jaunt for two to the Virgin Islands.
"In quintessential Dan Buettner fashion, he offered to me the opportunity to buy half the trip he won for free," laughs Tom Heuer, the friend who went along. "But it was a hell of a deal—it was $400."
At the bar sat Remar Sutton, a gentleman with a sweet Georgia drawl and flawless decorum, who was down for the winter to manage the hotel.
Sutton introduced himself and the conversation flowed. He regaled the young men with tales of his escapades as a writer and a promoter—his best friend was George Plimpton, the participatory journalist and gadabout.
When Buettner returned to Minnesota, Sutton kept in touch. A year and a half later, he and Plimpton hired Buettner to work on a fundraiser for National Public Radio as the associate producer of a celebrity croquet tournament.
Forty celebrities would play with 40 CEOs at a luxurious Florida development. The merry trio—Buettner, Sutton, and Plimpton—would handle the publicity and coordinate logistics, while the CEOs would finance their year of fun.
For nine months, the men lived like kings—riding around in limousines, staying in the finest hotels, and eating in the best restaurants. They shuttled from Sutton's headquarters in the Bahamas to Plimpton's place in New York.
"George was heavily influenced by the notion that you can do what you love and make a living out of it," Buettner says. "If you're good at universalizing your experiences in an artful way, you can pretty much do what you want to do."
Buettner loved long-distance cycling. So when the croquet gig was up, he planned a bike trip. He figured if he set a Guinness World Record, sponsors would line up to pay his way. He wanted to bike from Minnesota to the tip of Argentina. So he wrote to Guinness: Would they consider such a trip a world record?
"No," the record authorities wrote back.
"But if you start in a place, say, Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, the northern extreme of North America, and bike to the Southern extreme of South America, they would consider it," Buettner recalls. "And I'm like, 'Okay.'"
He spent a year raising money, and in 1986 set out with his brother Steve and four friends to conquer the Americas by bike. Ten months, five days, and 14 hours later, Buettner had cycled 15,500 miles and set a world record.
The accomplishment gave him not only the adventure he craved, but also the platform to build the Dan Buettner brand. People loved his stories of pedaling through Alaskan wilderness and Mexican fishing villages. Buettner milked the public-speaking circuit and found that he could work one day a month and make $900. With a low overhead because he still lived with his parents, that was all the money he needed.
In 1990, Buettner embarked on a second record-setting tour, this time 12,888 miles around the world via the Soviet Union. He wrote a book about the journey, winning a Minnesota Book Award.
By his third trek in 1992, Buettner had passed the age of 30 and wanted his travels to have more existential meaning. South Africa was still gripped by apartheid, so Buettner and his brother Steve decided to cycle the length and width of Africa—12,172 miles—with a multiracial team, including Chip Thomas, an African American doctor. F.W. de Klerk, president of South Africa, said the cyclists would be welcomed with open arms.
The trek across Africa was grueling. The cyclists pedaled for days on washboard roads and rutted mud, sometimes through war zones and often on no more fuel than bananas.
"As we were cycling south through Algeria, we heard all sorts of stories about travelers being kidnapped and killed," Thomas says.
When they reached one South African town, Buettner got off his bike and pulled out his map, as was the team's custom. A group of men circled him. One pulled out a club and whacked Buettner over the head. Buettner fell to the ground but managed to whip out his pepper spray and fend off his attackers. He ran to his bike and pedaled away as fast as he could as the men pelted him with rocks.
"That was scary," Buettner says.
Steve captured the trip and its emotions on a Hi8 camera, and Buettner's team kept in touch with students from 50,000 schools across the country via CNN and newsletter. Teachers used the expedition to teach the children about geography and social studies. Buettner wrote a book and produced an Emmy-winning documentary.
In 1995, Buettner and his brother Steve formed an educational company. Buettner would travel the globe in search of answers to the world's greatest mysteries, and his quests would be beamed into classrooms via satellite and the internet. Schoolchildren could participate in real time by telling the explorers where to go.
Buettner spent the next several years probing the fall of the ancient Maya, exploring humanity's origins in Africa, re-tracing Darwin's route through the Galapagos, and following Marco Polo's trail over the Silk Road. When Buettner sold the company in 1997, he made enough to buy his home on Lake of the Isles, where real estate runs in the millions.
"I do have a charmed life," Buettner says. "I was supposed to be a fireman in Roseville. You know, it's a result of strategic serendipity more than just dumb luck. I think you create your own charm when it comes to life."
IN 1998, Buettner was speaking at an education and technology conference in California when a woman from Japan approached him. Her company wanted him to do an educational quest for schoolchildren in Japan—would he be interested?
Buettner blew her off. But a few weeks later, the woman hopped a plane with three of her colleagues and flew to Minnesota to get Buettner's attention. It worked.
"The first thing I had to do was find an interesting mystery," Buettner recalls. "We looked at ancient bronze-age culture. They were all too esoteric."
Buettner stumbled upon his next obsession when his brother Nick turned up a World Health Organization report that said Okinawa Island had the longest disability-free life expectancy in the world.
"I said, 'That's a good mystery.'"
In the spring of 2000, Buettner stood behind a low-roofed home in the tiny fishing village of Ogimi as 99-year-old Ushi Okushima showed him the herbs growing in her terraced garden. Under her gentle care, ginger, turmeric, and wild onion flourished.
Over steaming cups of green tea shared on tatami mats inside her simple home, Buettner had pestered Ushi to show him her plants. He was convinced that some exotic herb growing innocuously behind the house held the key to Ushi's longevity.
"Yes, I do have longevity foods," Ushi told him.
Now, in the garden, Buettner pointed at a wild-looking herb. "Is this it?"
"No," Ushi said.
"Is this?"
"No, it's in the house, I'll show you later," Ushi said.
She waddled back into the house to the pantry, which held her secret to long life: a can of Spam.
Buettner laughed. Like him, the Spam had come to her all the way from Minnesota.
Everywhere, people were interested in longevity. Buettner could see it in the Web traffic following the Okinawa longevity quest. "It wasn't just kids anymore," he says. "There were dot-coms and dot-nets. So we knew that adults were interested in this."
When Buettner suggested a story on longevity hotspots to an editor at National Geographic, it was greeted with excitement.
"Now there you've got something," the editor said, urging him to do more research.
Buettner contacted Robert Kane, the director of the University of Minnesota's Center on Aging, and floated the idea. Kane was more than happy to help.
"I was excited at that point, because I wanted something that would change children's attitudes about old people," Kane says.
Kane introduced Buettner to the top demographers and scientists at the National Institute on Aging in Washington, D.C. Buettner flew to D.C. to make his pitch. He was rewarded with a $300,000 research grant—and, more importantly, scientific clout. "So I was able to surround the project with really the top names," Buettner says.
A world-renowned demographer told Buettner that Okinawa Island wasn't the world's only longevity hot spot—there was one in Sardinia. If there were going to be two places, American audiences would want a third in their own country, the National Geographic editor reasoned. Buettner's scientific contacts put him in touch with a well-documented longevity hotspot in California.
"The first three Blue Zones, they were found," Buettner says. "I just dug them out."
Now Buettner had the perfect formula: three hotspots of longevity in three countries. He slaved for months rewriting a one-page letter pitching the story to National Geographic, and in the end, the magazine couldn't turn him down.
In 2003, Buettner began his Blue Zone trips. The format for each expedition was the same: The first half was spent talking to every expert who could help him understand the culture's longevity secrets—anthropologists, historians, dieticians, geneticists. "You essentially give the ingredients to the recipe," Buettner says. "What is the profile of the culture—not the individual—that correlates with the longevity?" The second half of each trip was spent finding people who represent each culture's life-prolonging habits. "To tell a story, you need to find a good character," says Buettner.
In Loma Linda, Buettner spent a day with Marge Jetton, a spry, upbeat 101-year-old with a well-ordered pouf of curls. Buettner arranged to meet Marge at the hair salon she has visited every Friday for 20 years. He was supposed to arrive at 8 a.m.
"You're late!" Marge shouted when Buettner stepped into the salon behind schedule.
Half an hour later, Marge's hair freshly done, she and Buettner zipped along Southern California's network of freeways in her mauve Cadillac sedan, on their way to Marge's volunteer appointments. First stop: a retirement home, where she lugged in four bundles of magazines. "The old folks here like to read them and cut out the pictures for crafts," she explained to Buettner.
Marge was a Seventh-Day Adventist, one of thousands living in Loma Linda, a smog-encrusted community halfway between Palm Springs and Los Angeles. The Adventist religion prohibits smoking, drinking alcohol, and eating biblically unclean foods such as pork, Buettner learned. It also discourages consuming other meat, rich foods, caffeinated drinks, and stimulating spices.
Adventists are a highly studied group—from 1976 to 1988, the National Institutes of Health funded a study of 34,000 California Adventists, and a new study is going on now. The earlier study concluded that the average Adventist lives four to ten years longer than the average Californian. Their diet of soybeans, tomatoes, and other fruits lowered their risk of developing certain cancers. Eating whole wheat bread, drinking five glasses of water a day, and consuming four servings of nuts per week reduced their risk of heart disease.
Buettner wove together his visits to Okinawa, Sardinia, and Loma Linda in a lively, fun-to-read story that made the cover of National Geographic. It was an instant sensation, quickly becoming the third best-selling issue in the magazine's history. Buettner did the media circuit on Anderson Cooper, Good Morning America, CNN, Fox.
Buettner's National Geographic story was such a success that he got a book deal to expand on the concept. He continued the search for more hotspots, finding Blue Zones in the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica and the beautiful island Ikaria off the coast of Greece. Buettner's first book, Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who've Lived the Longest, was a New York Times bestseller. It helped that Buettner was embraced by Oprah.
Oprah welcomed Buettner to her show along with her regular guest, Dr. Oz, who had recently accompanied Buettner to Nicoya to see the Blue Zone concept firsthand. Among the lessons for Winfrey's audience: the importance of getting up off the couch.
"You know, most Americans don't really exercise. A very small proportion," Buettner told Oprah. "But in Nicoya, they'll be making lunch and it's like doing 25 reps with the free weights."
WHILE BUETTNER WAS researching a new book—on "how you set up your life so that you can live longer without even thinking about it"—he began thinking about how to bring the Blue Zones lessons to a real community.
Buettner called everyone he knew in the public health field, looking for models. "Lo and behold, there's none of them," Buettner says. So he started thinking about how to do it himself.
He met with Nancy Graham, editor of AARP Magazine, who was also interested in doing a city health makeover. Buettner presented his ideas to United Health Foundation, which kicked in $750,000 toward the $1 million project. He asked Leslie Lytle, a community health behavior expert at the University of Minnesota, to co-direct the project, and hired Joel Spoonheim, a former planner, to run the daily operations.
With the funding in place, Buettner and his team had to choose a city. The University of Minnesota helped Spoonheim come up with the criteria: It had to be a statistically normal town that fit the national average for health indicators like cardiovascular disease and obesity, it had to be a freestanding town of 10,000 to 20,000, and it had to be within driving distance of the Twin Cities. Fifteen Minnesota cities met the criteria. Once Spoonheim ruled out college towns, 10 cities were left in the running.
Spoonheim called each of the towns and pitched the idea: Did they want to be America's first pre-fab Blue Zone city? Spoonheim gave applications to the three most enthusiastic. Then it was down to which city had the strongest commitment to the project.
On Christmas Eve, 2008, Spoonheim made a phone call. Buettner and his team had decided where to create America's first intentional Blue Zone: In Albert Lea, a picturesque community of about 18,000 souls about an hour and a half south of Minneapolis.
In January 2009, Dan Burden, a Florida native bundled in four layers under his winter coat, stepped out of a bus alongside a snow bank edging a road just outside of downtown Albert Lea. The temperature was -53 degrees. As a group of city officials and Buettner's team looked on, shivering, Burden stamped his feet for warmth and pointed at the ground. This was a great place for a sidewalk, he explained, the hot steam of his breath vanishing rapidly into the frigid air.
Burden was the first of four expert consultants called on to make over the town. By the end of his two-day visit, the city was shuffling its budgets to find money for a walking path around Fountain Lake, the town's central jewel.
As winter gave way to spring, Buettner's team launched several initiatives. They divided the Blue Zone's nine life lessons into four categories—move naturally, eat wisely, right outlook, and connect—and came up with ways for the town to adopt the changes with relative ease. Lytle worked with the school districts to revise their nutritional programs. Spoonheim assisted locally owned grocery stores in creating signs to identify healthy foods and recruited restaurants to make changes to menus.
On May 14, the auditorium of the high school gym filled with the kick-off celebration of the Vitality Project in Albert Lea. The high school cheer squad and drum line welcomed residents into the gym. A cadre of 150 volunteers clad in blue T-shirts handed out welcome packets. Dr. Brian Wansink, head of the Food Lab at Cornell University, introduced the Blue Zone concept and ways to get involved. Then residents visited booths and signed pledges.
Throughout the summer, Albert Lea put those pledges into practice. Groups of neighbors joined walking moais, meeting regularly to walk and talk. Albert Lea residents took cooking classes, planted food in community gardens, and learned how to find their purpose through a series of workshops.
By October, close to 20 percent of Albert Lea's residents had participated in the Vitality Project. An online questionnaire helped 786 residents determine their before-and-after life expectancies, which rose by an average of 2.9 years. City workers and their families lowered their health care costs by 32 percent in 10 months.
For Brian Mattson, a 39-year-old social worker, the Vitality Project launched a new way of life. Overweight by 150 pounds, Mattson typically spent evenings alone in his home, watching television and eating entire bags of Doritos. When his mom dragged him to the Vitality Project kick-off, he committed to walking with his neighbors.
"Pretty soon you start doing it regularly," Mattson says, adding that more changes then seemed possible. "It became: 'I'll eat more fruits and vegetables.'"
Now Mattson has lost 30 pounds, and he's starting to work on his social connections. Recently, he played a small part in a local theater production—something he used to love but had let fall by the wayside for nearly a decade.
Though Buettner recommends making no more than three changes at a time, the Furland family—Sue and Bob, both in their 40s, and their sons Tom, 16, and Tim, 14—decided to adopt all the changes. They planted a garden in their backyard, joined walking moais, renewed their commitments to church and volunteer activities, and consumed less meat and more grains and nuts.
"People just felt together on something," Bob says of the community response. "Everybody that was involved seemed happier when you'd go to the events."
DAN BUETTNER STRIDES into Caribou Coffee in Uptown, dressed in yuppie yogi gear: black T-shirt emblazoned with a neon Buddha, zip-up fleece bearing the insignia of lululemon athletica—the brand favored by wealthy women who do Bikram. Despite his book's admonition to show up early, Buettner arrives late—he couldn't find a parking spot.
The coffee shop is Buettner's frequent morning office, where he sweats away over the keyboard on the manuscript for his forthcoming book on happiness. Here, the coffee barista greets him by name. He orders the new hot cocoa, the one with real, rich chocolate pieces melted into milk. It's not exactly on the Blue Zones meal plan, but Buettner likes to try new things.
He carries his paper cup to a big wooden table by the front window and takes a seat. As the talk turns to his project in Albert Lea, Buettner flips open his laptop and brings up the stats from the life expectancy survey.
In a chair nearby, a 30-something man overhears. His ears perk up. He leans over and addresses Buettner.
"Hey, man, I just started following you on Twitter."
Buettner looks up, a little startled, and smiles.
"Oh," he says. "Who knows where that will lead?" He smiles. "But thanks."
Buettner's big project now is taking his Blue Zones to more cities. Already, several cities are interested in being the sites of the makeover, and a health reform corporation called Healthways has signed on as a partner.
"I've made my career out of making discoveries and making those discoveries interesting to the general population. I like doing that," Buettner says. "You can walk up a hillside and get to the top and see a beautiful sunset, but it's better if you discover that and you're with somebody else.
"I have a thrill out of recognizing something and saying, 'Isn't this amazing,'" Buettner says. "I get to do it by a factor of 10 million." The Power of Nine
Buettner's "nine little things" aren't exactly groundbreaking. In fact, what Buettner uncovered in his global pursuit of the fountain of youth turned out to be well-established medical principles that doctors and social scientists have known about for years. Buettner's real contribution is in distilling the wisdom of traditional cultures into easy-to-follow steps—he calls them the Power Nine.
Move naturally
When he was traveling with Buettner in Okinawa, Greg Plotnikoff, medical director of Abbott Northwestern's integrative medicine program, was impressed with the agility of a woman in her late 80s who served her visitors green tea.
"She comes out of the kitchen area carrying a tray—on it is a beautiful teapot and teacups—and with minimal effort, carrying this tray with hot boiling water and beautiful pottery, with no assistance, she lowers herself to the floor," Plotnikoff says. "Balance and strength and flexibility were built into her daily life."
Buettner recommends finding a physical activity you like, setting a date with a friend to do it together, and making movement a regular part of your life.
Hara hachi bu
The Confucian-inspired Okinawan saying means, roughly, eat until you're 80 percent full. That's not a diet strategy—it's a way of life. Rather than stop eating once they are full, as most Americans do, Okinawans stop eating once they are no longer hungry.
Using smaller plates and tall, thin glasses makes portions seem bigger and is an effective way to painlessly cut overeating, according to Wansink, the food expert. Wansink also recommends eating slowly, savoring each bite.
Eat a plant-based diet
Strict Adventists avoid meat entirely. Sardinians and Okinawans enjoy it only occasionally—at festivals and special celebrations. Studies have shown that vegetarianism is associated with longevity.
Worried about getting enough protein? Actually, adults over age 19 only need about 0.8 grams of protein for every 2.2 lbs. of body weight—or about 1.8 to 2.8 ounces per day, according to Lytle. And there is plenty of iron in fortified grains.
To live like the people of Sardinia, Loma Linda, and Okinawa, Buettner recommends making beans and tofu the centerpieces of meals, eating four to six servings of vegetables per day, and adding nuts to your daily intake.
Bottoms up
Okinawans enjoy sake. The shepherds of Sardinia drink wine made from Cannonau grapes. About a glass or two a day is right—any more than that will bring negative consequences that offset the health benefits of moderate drinking.
Find your purpose
Okinawans call it ikigai, Nicoyans call it plan de vida. Richard Leider, world-renowned expert on finding meaning in life, calls it "the reason to get up in the morning."
"It's not just a nice-to-have thing," says Leider. "Purpose is the golden thread that holds the other factors in vitality together—health, wellness, diet, exercise."
To find your purpose, Leider recommends asking yourself some basic questions.
"What are your gifts?" he says. "What are your passions—what do you care about? What are your values—what are environments you want to be working in? Gifts plus passions plus values equals calling or purpose."
De-stress
Adventists have a ready-made de-stressor called the Sabbath. They don't do work or organized sports or homework those days. Instead, they spend time with their families, creating a sense of closeness and balance.
To lower stress in your own life, Buettner recommends reducing noise in the home by turning off the television or radio. Aim to arrive to appointments 15 minutes early—it helps cut anxiety and creates a cushion for traffic and parking time. And start a meditation practice of at least 10 minutes a day, eventually working up to 30 minutes.
Get spiritual
If you already attend a church or spiritual center, renew your commitment by becoming more involved. If organized religion's not for you, you might consider humanist groups, like Unitarian Universalism.
Family first
Sardinians would be ashamed to place their elders in a retirement home. Okinawans pray to their ancestors each day. People who center their lives on family are generally happier, Buettner says. Create rituals and spend time together.
Find your people
Studies show that people become like one another as they spend time together. So surround yourself with people who are committed to you and who support your healthy choices. Be likeable. Identify your inner circle and invest in those friendships—find a regular time to meet and share your lives.
New stem-cell technique uses skin cells, mimics embryonic stem cells
Researchers in Boston have announced the discovery of a technique that can convert ordinary human skin cells into cells that are functionally identical to embryonic stem cells. Early results from the new technique, reported by scientists at Children’s Hospital in Boston, show success in producing new cells that can be developed into any other type of tissue for the human body. These cells could potentially replace embryonic stem cells, which have been used by scientists for the same purpose.
Later
What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?
by James Surowiecki
October 11, 2010
Procrastination interests philosophers because of its underlying irrationality.
Some years ago, the economist George Akerlof found himself faced with a simple task: mailing a box of clothes from India, where he was living, to the United States. The clothes belonged to his friend and colleague Joseph Stiglitz, who had left them behind when visiting, so Akerlof was eager to send the box off. But there was a problem. The combination of Indian bureaucracy and what Akerlof called “my own ineptitude in such matters” meant that doing so was going to be a hassle—indeed, he estimated that it would take an entire workday. So he put off dealing with it, week after week. This went on for more than eight months, and it was only shortly before Akerlof himself returned home that he managed to solve his problem: another friend happened to be sending some things back to the U.S., and Akerlof was able to add Stiglitz’s clothes to the shipment. Given the vagaries of intercontinental mail, it’s possible that Akerlof made it back to the States before Stiglitz’s shirts did.
There’s something comforting about this story: even Nobel-winning economists procrastinate! Many of us go through life with an array of undone tasks, large and small, nibbling at our conscience. But Akerlof saw the experience, for all its familiarity, as mysterious. He genuinely intended to send the box to his friend, yet, as he wrote, in a paper called “Procrastination and Obedience” (1991), “each morning for over eight months I woke up and decided that the next morning would be the day to send the Stiglitz box.” He was always about to send the box, but the moment to act never arrived. Akerlof, who became one of the central figures in behavioral economics, came to the realization that procrastination might be more than just a bad habit. He argued that it revealed something important about the limits of rational thinking and that it could teach useful lessons about phenomena as diverse as substance abuse and savings habits. Since his essay was published, the study of procrastination has become a significant field in academia, with philosophers, psychologists, and economists all weighing in.
Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author’s own problems with finishing the piece. (This article will be no exception.) But the academic buzz around the subject isn’t just a case of eggheads rationalizing their slothfulness. As various scholars argue in “The Thief of Time,” edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D. White (Oxford; $65)—a collection of essays on procrastination, ranging from the resolutely theoretical to the surprisingly practical—the tendency raises fundamental philosophical and psychological issues. You may have thought, the last time you blew off work on a presentation to watch “How I Met Your Mother,” that you were just slacking. But from another angle you were actually engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time. Indeed, one essay, by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is “as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”
Ainslie is probably right that procrastination is a basic human impulse, but anxiety about it as a serious problem seems to have emerged in the early modern era. The term itself (derived from a Latin word meaning “to put off for tomorrow”) entered the English language in the sixteenth century, and, by the eighteenth, Samuel Johnson was describing it as “one of the general weaknesses” that “prevail to a greater or less degree in every mind,” and lamenting the tendency in himself: “I could not forbear to reproach myself for having so long neglected what was unavoidably to be done, and of which every moment’s idleness increased the difficulty.” And the problem seems to be getting worse all the time. According to Piers Steel, a business professor at the University of Calgary, the percentage of people who admitted to difficulties with procrastination quadrupled between 1978 and 2002. In that light, it’s possible to see procrastination as the quintessential modern problem.
It’s also a surprisingly costly one. Each year, Americans waste hundreds of millions of dollars because they don’t file their taxes on time. The Harvard economist David Laibson has shown that American workers have forgone huge amounts of money in matching 401(k) contributions because they never got around to signing up for a retirement plan. Seventy per cent of patients suffering from glaucoma risk blindness because they don’t use their eyedrops regularly. Procrastination also inflicts major costs on businesses and governments. The recent crisis of the euro was exacerbated by the German government’s dithering, and the decline of the American auto industry, exemplified by the bankruptcy of G.M., was due in part to executives’ penchant for delaying tough decisions. (In Alex Taylor’s recent history of G.M., “Sixty to Zero,” one of the key conclusions is “Procrastination doesn’t pay.”)
Philosophers are interested in procrastination for another reason. It’s a powerful example of what the Greeks called akrasia—doing something against one’s own better judgment. Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off. In other words, if you’re simply saying “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” you’re not really procrastinating. Knowingly delaying because you think that’s the most efficient use of your time doesn’t count, either. The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy. In one study, sixty-five per cent of students surveyed before they started working on a term paper said they would like to avoid procrastinating: they knew both that they wouldn’t do the work on time and that the delay would make them unhappy.
Most of the contributors to the new book agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time—in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting.” A two-stage experiment provides a classic illustration: In the first stage, people are offered the choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow; in the second stage, they choose between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In substance, the two choices are identical: wait an extra day, get an extra ten bucks. Yet, in the first stage many people choose to take the smaller sum immediately, whereas in the second they prefer to wait one more day and get the extra ten bucks. In other words, hyperbolic discounters are able to make the rational choice when they’re thinking about the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. A similar phenomenon is at work in an experiment run by a group including the economist George Loewenstein, in which people were asked to pick one movie to watch that night and one to watch at a later date. Not surprisingly, for the movie they wanted to watch immediately, people tended to pick lowbrow comedies and blockbusters, but when asked what movie they wanted to watch later they were more likely to pick serious, important films. The problem, of course, is that when the time comes to watch the serious movie, another frothy one will often seem more appealing. This is why Netflix queues are filled with movies that never get watched: our responsible selves put “Hotel Rwanda” and “The Seventh Seal” in our queue, but when the time comes we end up in front of a rerun of “The Hangover.”
The lesson of these experiments is not that people are shortsighted or shallow but that their preferences aren’t consistent over time. We want to watch the Bergman masterpiece, to give ourselves enough time to write the report properly, to set aside money for retirement. But our desires shift as the long run becomes the short run.
Why does this happen? One common answer is ignorance. Socrates believed that akrasia was, strictly speaking, impossible, since we could not want what is bad for us; if we act against our own interests, it must be because we don’t know what’s right. Loewenstein, similarly, is inclined to see the procrastinator as led astray by the “visceral” rewards of the present. As the nineteenth-century Scottish economist John Rae put it, “The prospects of future good, which future years may hold on us, seem at such a moment dull and dubious, and are apt to be slighted, for objects on which the daylight is falling strongly, and showing us in all their freshness just within our grasp.” Loewenstein also suggests that our memory for the intensity of visceral rewards is deficient: when we put off preparing for that meeting by telling ourselves that we’ll do it tomorrow, we fail to take into account that tomorrow the temptation to put off work will be just as strong.
Ignorance might also affect procrastination through what the social scientist Jon Elster calls “the planning fallacy.” Elster thinks that people underestimate the time “it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it has taken them to complete similar projects in the past and partly because they rely on smooth scenarios in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur.” When I was writing this piece, for instance, I had to take my car into the shop, I had to take two unanticipated trips, a family member fell ill, and so on. Each of these events was, strictly speaking, unexpected, and each took time away from my work. But they were really just the kinds of problems you predictably have to deal with in everyday life. Pretending I wouldn’t have any interruptions to my work was a typical illustration of the planning fallacy.
Still, ignorance can’t be the whole story. In the first place, we often procrastinate not by doing fun tasks but by doing jobs whose only allure is that they aren’t what we should be doing. My apartment, for instance, has rarely looked tidier than it does at the moment. And people do learn from experience: procrastinators know all too well the allures of the salient present, and they want to resist them. They just don’t. A magazine editor I know, for instance, once had a writer tell her at noon on a Wednesday that the time-sensitive piece he was working on would be in her in-box by the time she got back from lunch. She did eventually get the piece—the following Tuesday. So a fuller explanation of procrastination really needs to take account of our attitudes to the tasks being avoided. A useful example can be found in the career of General George McClellan, who led the Army of the Potomac during the early years of the Civil War and was one of the greatest procrastinators of all time. When he took charge of the Union army, McClellan was considered a military genius, but he soon became famous for his chronic hesitancy. In 1862, despite an excellent opportunity to take Richmond from Robert E. Lee’s men, with another Union army attacking in a pincer move, he dillydallied, convinced that he was blocked by hordes of Confederate soldiers, and missed his chance. Later that year, both before and after Antietam, he delayed again, squandering a two-to-one advantage over Lee’s troops. Afterward, Union General-in-Chief Henry Halleck wrote, “There is an immobility here that exceeds all that any man can conceive of. It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert mass.”
McClellan’s “immobility” highlights several classic reasons we procrastinate. Although when he took over the Union army he told Lincoln “I can do it all,” he seems to have been unsure that he could do anything. He was perpetually imploring Lincoln for new weapons, and, in the words of one observer, “he felt he never had enough troops, well enough trained or equipped.” Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a vicious cycle. McClellan was also given to excessive planning, as if only the ideal battle plan were worth acting on. Procrastinators often succumb to this sort of perfectionism.
Viewed this way, procrastination starts to look less like a question of mere ignorance than like a complex mixture of weakness, ambition, and inner conflict. But some of the philosophers in “The Thief of Time” have a more radical explanation for the gap between what we want to do and what we end up doing: the person who makes plans and the person who fails to carry them out are not really the same person: they’re different parts of what the game theorist Thomas Schelling called “the divided self.” Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves not as unified selves but as different beings, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control. Ian McEwan evokes this state in his recent novel “Solar”: “At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy.” Similarly, Otto von Bismarck said, “Faust complained about having two souls in his breast, but I harbor a whole crowd of them and they quarrel. It is like being in a republic.” In that sense, the first step to dealing with procrastination isn’t admitting that you have a problem. It’s admitting that your “you”s have a problem.
If identity is a collection of competing selves, what does each of them represent? The easy answer is that one represents your short-term interests (having fun, putting off work, and so on), while another represents your long-term goals. But, if that’s the case, it’s not obvious how you’d ever get anything done: the short-term self, it seems, would always win out. The philosopher Don Ross offers a persuasive solution to the problem. For Ross, the various parts of the self are all present at once, constantly competing and bargaining with one another—one that wants to work, one that wants to watch television, and so on. The key, for Ross, is that although the television-watching self is interested only in watching TV, it’s interested in watching TV not just now but also in the future. This means that it can be bargained with: working now will let you watch more television down the road. Procrastination, in this reading, is the result of a bargaining process gone wrong.
The idea of the divided self, though discomfiting to some, can be liberating in practical terms, because it encourages you to stop thinking about procrastination as something you can beat by just trying harder. Instead, we should rely on what Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson, in their essay in “The Thief of Time,” call “the extended will”—external tools and techniques to help the parts of our selves that want to work. A classic illustration of the extended will at work is Ulysses’ decision to have his men bind him to the mast of his ship. Ulysses knows that when he hears the Sirens he will be too weak to resist steering the ship onto the rocks in pursuit of them, so he has his men bind him, thereby forcing him to adhere to his long-term aims. Similarly, Thomas Schelling once said that he would be willing to pay extra in advance for a hotel room without a television in it. Today, problem gamblers write contracts with casinos banning them from the premises. And people who are trying to lose weight or finish a project will sometimes make bets with their friends so that if they don’t deliver on their promise it’ll cost them money. In 2008, a Ph.D. candidate at Chapel Hill wrote software that enables people to shut off their access to the Internet for up to eight hours; the program, called Freedom, now has an estimated seventy-five thousand users.
Not everyone in “The Thief of Time” approves of the reliance on the extended will. Mark D. White advances an idealist argument rooted in Kantian ethics: recognizing procrastination as a failure of will, we should seek to strengthen the will rather than relying on external controls that will allow it to atrophy further. This isn’t a completely fruitless task: much recent research suggests that will power is, in some ways, like a muscle and can be made stronger. The same research, though, also suggests that most of us have a limited amount of will power and that it’s easily exhausted. In one famous study, people who had been asked to restrain themselves from readily available temptation—in this case, a pile of chocolate-chip cookies that they weren’t allowed to touch—had a harder time persisting in a difficult task than people who were allowed to eat the cookies.
Given this tendency, it makes sense that we often rely intuitively on external rules to help ourselves out. A few years ago, Dan Ariely, a psychologist at M.I.T., did a fascinating experiment examining one of the most basic external tools for dealing with procrastination: deadlines. Students in a class were assigned three papers for the semester, and they were given a choice: they could set separate deadlines for when they had to hand in each of the papers or they could hand them all in together at the end of the semester. There was no benefit to handing the papers in early, since they were all going to be graded at semester’s end, and there was a potential cost to setting the deadlines, since if you missed a deadline your grade would be docked. So the rational thing to do was to hand in all the papers at the end of the semester; that way you’d be free to write the papers sooner but not at risk of a penalty if you didn’t get around to it. Yet most of the students chose to set separate deadlines for each paper, precisely because they knew that they were otherwise unlikely to get around to working on the papers early, which meant they ran the risk of not finishing all three by the end of the semester. This is the essence of the extended will: instead of trusting themselves, the students relied on an outside tool to make themselves do what they actually wanted to do.
Beyond self-binding, there are other ways to avoid dragging your feet, most of which depend on what psychologists might call reframing the task in front of you. Procrastination is driven, in part, by the gap between effort (which is required now) and reward (which you reap only in the future, if ever). So narrowing that gap, by whatever means necessary, helps. Since open-ended tasks with distant deadlines are much easier to postpone than focussed, short-term projects, dividing projects into smaller, more defined sections helps. That’s why David Allen, the author of the best-selling time-management book “Getting Things Done,” lays great emphasis on classification and definition: the vaguer the task, or the more abstract the thinking it requires, the less likely you are to finish it. One German study suggests that just getting people to think about concrete problems (like how to open a bank account) makes them better at finishing their work—even when it deals with a completely different subject. Another way of making procrastination less likely is to reduce the amount of choice we have: often when people are afraid of making the wrong choice they end up doing nothing. So companies might be better off offering their employees fewer investment choices in their 401(k) plans, and making signing up for the plan the default option.
It’s hard to ignore the fact that all these tools are at root about imposing limits and narrowing options—in other words, about a voluntary abnegation of freedom. (Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing.) But before we rush to overcome procrastination we should consider whether it is sometimes an impulse we should heed. The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.” In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too, is to figure out which is which. ¦
London theatre-goers to be invited to Barbican sleepover
Arts lovers heading to London next summer are to be offered the chance to fall asleep at the theatre without being considered rude or uncultured.The latest eyebrow-raising show due to be staged at the vibrant Barbican centre, in the heart of the City of London, Lullaby will run for the whole of June 2011.As well as actors taking to the stage to tell stories and sing soothing songs, the experimental work will also see the Barbican's Pit Theatre transformed into a giant bedroom, complete with en-suite bathroom cubicles.To add to the experience, audience members will be asked to bring their own pyjamas to change into, while the price of a ticket will also include breakfast the morning after.Explaining the thinking behind Lullaby, producer Simon Casson said: "Every time I go to the theatre I fall asleep, so I thought why don't we embrace that idea and make a show that deliberately sends people to sleep?"Over the autumn 2010 season, meanwhile, the Barbican will stage shows such as Macbeth, Dance in the City and the Bicycle Film Festival.
Big Ben to be renamed after Queen Elizabeth II
Britain's famous parliament clock tower, Big Ben, is to be renamed Elizabeth Tower in honour of the Queen's diamond jubilee, officials announced on Tuesday.
The change comes after dozens of British politicians signed up to a campaign to change the name of the tower - officially named the Clock Tower but commonly known as Big Ben - in celebration of Queen Elizabeth II's 60th year on the throne.
Big Ben is technically the name of the huge bell at the top of the 96-metre tower, one of London's best-loved landmarks.
"The House of Commons Commission welcomed the proposal to rename the Clock Tower in recognition of The Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and will arrange for this decision to be implemented in an appropriate manner in due course," a spokesman said.
Politicians have accepted that the iconic tower, which sounds out the hours over central London with distinctive "bongs", will continue to be known colloquially as Big Ben.
The change mirrors an honour bestowed on queen Victoria - the only other British monarch to celebrate a diamond jubilee back in 1897 - who gives her name to the other tower at the west end of parliament.
A spokesman for prime minister David Cameron said the name change was "a fitting tribute to the Queen and the service she has given to our country in this jubilee year".
In January, politicians met to discuss how to manage a 0.26 degree tilt to the tower, which looms over the 19-century gothic revival parliament.
The tilt to the north-west has increased very slightly since 2003, although an expert study found it was unlikely to be a problem for 10,000 years.
There are two competing theories of how the bell came to be known as Big Ben.
The most likely explanation is that it was named after Benjamin Hall, the engineer whose name is inscribed on the bell, but some believe it is named after Ben Caunt, a champion heavyweight boxer of the 1850s.
Britain held four days of jubilee celebrations at the beginning of June, including a spectacular 1,000-boat pageant on the River Thames and a star-studded concert at Buckingham Palace.
The monarch and her husband Prince Philip are in Northern Ireland on Tuesday and Wednesday as part of a nationwide jubilee tour, while other royals are travelling the globe.
