Eulogy

This was hard. I've talked a lot in public; I'm good at talking.

The people I talked to on August 9th saw me barely make it through what I had to say.

On Tuesday, August 3rd, my Mom died.

A few days later, my siblings asked me to speak at my mom's funeral. The eulogy I delivered was the hardest thing I've ever had to say. And maybe the most important.

How do you take something so life-filling and make it into words?

I told three stories from our recent life. I talked about who Mom was to me and tried to get at how she lived and what she did. I found myself weeping several times. I'm weeping as I write this now.

It's tough for me to talk about this, so I've posted what I said:

Nathanael's Eulogy for His Mom by nyellis

I stumbled through a few stories, showing who Mom is to me. There's a difference between telling and showing, and I tried to show. I also used quotes. Maybe a weak way of saying things, but reading the same scripture as I read at my Great Uncle (grandfather's) funeral seemed right.

It's a tough time for us. Like many families, I presume, Mom was our center.

My Dad said:

That's hard. Life shouldn't be like this.

We're taking donations in Mom's memory. God gave her and Dad a vision of working with orphans in China. Learn more at the little website we made.

Another tweet from Dad:

www.pattyyellis.org

Guru = Charlatan

Peter Drucker:

“I have been saying for many years that we are using the word ‘guru’ only because ‘charlatan’ is too long to fit into a headline.”

I value doers over gurus. Why pay someone to give you there wisdom when you can learn it yourself?

Big word help: A charlatan (also called swindler or mountebank) is a person practicing quackery or some similar confidence trick in order to obtain money, fame or other advantages via some form of pretence or deception. (Wikipedia.)

First Impression = Only Impression, if Done Poorly

This is great stuff from the HBR blog:

"In this era of double-digit unemployment, many of us are either job-hunting or helping friends and colleagues who are searching for employment. After crafting a cover letter, set it aside, do something else as a distraction, and then return to it with fresh eyes. Imagine you are the hiring manager and this has landed on your desk or in your in-box. Does the letter capture your attention from the very first moment?"

Think about the audience and talk to them directly. Link to full blog: Effective Communciation Begins with a First Impression

Guster - C'mon (Video)

I know I've been out of touch lately. New job, new city, etc.

But this still makes Friday better for me:

Acton Book Club: Happiness Hypothesis

I'm participating in a virtual book club organized by my alma mater, the Acton School of Business. I'm excited for the discussion and the titles we'll cover: Acton's ongoing reading list has broadened my horizons already.

The first book we read was The Happiness Hypothesis. I just finished it and typed out my thoughts for the Acton blog entry kicking off the discussion. I'll link to the discussion when it starts up, but here's what I wrote:

This book captured exactly why I was uncomfortable with Acton's 'behavioral economics' discussions. The author assumes that science is the ultimate arbiter of truth. This book brings the wisdom of the ancients (philosophy) to contemporary science, and judges philosophy with the ultimate of scientific tests: correlative studies. Some cool ideas emerged about why the ancients may have been right; but what I saw emerge was far more troubling.

The author assumes we can then connect the 'is' to some set of 'oughts' and then have a set of parameters along which to live. The conclusion of this book is that there are a whole bunch of factors we should consider, then we set ourselves somewhere in the middle and wait for happiness to happen. If we accept this, science is our ultimate truth. Everything starts with science's best answer about what is.

I think a lot truth can be best understood through science. But when we are talking about the inner part of human beings, the soul, I think science has limits. I'd rather identify ends to pursue and actively work towards them. But science can't help: it only covers what is, not what should be. I'm fine with considering philosophy in light of psychology (social science), but our conception of truth should be firmly rooted in the former.