A recent U.K. study showed that the average office worker spends around 16 hours in meetings each week. That’s over 800 hours a year. For a grand total over an entire career of–are you sitting down?–37,440 hours of meetings. That’s more than 4 years of your precious time.

There are few tried and true strategies for running productive meetings: Be prepared, have a leader, an agenda, a fixed time to start and stop, a conclusion and plan to follow up. But if we have to sit around in a windowless conference room for 9,000 hours, can’t we come up with something more . . . engaging?

Here are 10 strategies to get your office meeting off life support. Plus a bonus tip on meetings from Mark Zuckerberg:

1. Pretend you’ve already failed.

Guy Kawasaki, a business guru and best-selling author, advises business leaders to gather their team before making critical decisions such as launching a product or service. He suggests seizing these moments to say, “Let us pretend that our product, our company failed. Now, what are all the possible reasons?” The reasons may include lack of distribution, an unsophisticated sales force, buggy software, or unreliable cloud services. According to Kawasaki, the point is to get people imagining everything that could go wrong, so they can take steps to remedy problems before they happen. In other words, he says, “Conduct a pre-mortem so that you never have to conduct a post-mortem.”

2. Keep it Novel.

Richard Branson, Virgin founder, writes about adding novelty to freshen up meetings. He invites thought-provoking speakers in diverse fields from astronomy to nanotechnology to get groups thinking in “new, exploratory ways.” And he holds discussions in innovative spaces. Though you may not possess your own private island like Branson, he suggests that anyone can leave the desks behind and head out to the park, because a ”change of scenery and a bit of fun does wonders for getting people thinking differently and loosening up!” (Also see Nilofer Merchant’s TED talk on walking meetings and Jason Yip’s guide to stand-up meetings.)

3. Pause.

Clay Shirky, an author who covers the social, economic, and cultural effects of the Internet, has a bit of advice for those who charge off to meetings in a frenzied, preoccupied state. Shirky learned an important lesson when he was a student in London. To get into a receptive frame of mind for his studies he would pause during his walk over the river Thames on his way to the lecture hall. He wrote, “Crossing this majestic river was like passing from one world to another. I liked standing on the bridge and enjoying the flowing stillness in-between.” Later, Shirky applied this meditative technique to his workplace meetings. He’d imagine the walk from his desk to the meeting room as a similar journey that gave him time to reflect as he prepared for the meeting. “Time taken to pause,” he wrote, “even if it is a few seconds, can be valuable. It could be the difference between a good idea and a great idea in your next meeting.”

4. Don’t squander youth.

Sean Higby, COO of Newsala, a real-time media app, believes that there is great value in the opinions of junior colleagues. He regularly invites them to meetings and solicits their feedback. Higby says, “Their ears are often closer to the street so they instinctually know what your customers want. Often they’re working for you because they’re a fan of the industry and are up on the latest, yet-to-be-reported trends, and their opinions are not clouded by what other people think is not possible.”

5. Say it in 5 words.

Christopher Frank, an author and vice president at American Express, has some words of wisdom for those trying to answer the question: “What exactly are we meeting about?” He suggests a Twitter-like hack–start your meeting by asking each person to articulate in five words or less the problem to be solved. If the answers are inconsistent or too long, your attendees are probably not focused on the same problem. “By clearly articulating the issue,” Frank wrote in an article for Forbes, “you will get a good idea of the information you need, the people you should talk to and will ensure everyone is working towards the same goal.”

6. Think like a director.

Patrick Lencioni president of The Table Group, a management consulting firm, and the author of Death by Meeting, believes that the cure for boring and unproductive meetings is to think of them as if you were a movie director. He suggests replacing “agendas and decorum with passion and conflict.” This will engage people and give them something to care about. “The good news,” he says, is that “there are plenty of issues at every meeting that have the potential for productive, relevant conflict.”

7. Get them laughing.

Suzanne Bates, founder of Bates Communications, who coaches executives says, “Humor actually increases your stature as a leader.” She goes on to explain that, “If you can warm up the room and make people smile, you stand out. You gain the respect of your colleagues, you appear confident and in control.” As a colleague of hers added, “Who looks like a leader–the person who is stiff and formal, or the one who can help the whole group loosen up?”

8. Bring something to the table or don’t come at all.

Al Pittampalli, author of Read This Before Our Next Meeting, believes in requiring those who come to your meetings to “turn up in mind and spirit and contribute something.” This could include “asking questions, sharing insight or offering to take on tasks.” Pittampalli suggests making this message stick by letting everyone know that if they aren’t bringing added value they won’t be invited to future meetings.

9. Be like a talk show host.

For two years, Ian Fisher, an assistant managing editor at The New York Times, ran the newsroom’s morning meeting in which editors from different sections battle vigorously for best play of their stories. Fisher had to allow enough time for complicated information to be communicated as well as leave time for discussion to deepen coverage. “But a half an hour is about a normal human’s attention span,” he says. He had to know when to bore in, and when to move on. “I called myself Regis,” he told us. “Say what you want, but he knew when it was time to go to the commercial.”

10. Use meetings to beget meetings.

For those of you just getting started and trying to network your way to success, here’s a tip from Valentina Rice, a champion networker and founder of Many Kitchens, an online artisanal food marketplace. Rice’s father, a prominent English businessman, often told her, “Never leave a meeting without getting the names of two more people to meet.”

Bonus tip: Boy Meets World.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who you may imagine has better things to do with his time, took on a personal challenge in 2013 to meet a new person (outside of Facebook) every single day for the entire year. Why? To do more things for the community and get “broader exposure.”

From our recent story at Fast Company.

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To arm you in the coming struggle to pursue your post-graduate goals it may help to take a look at some proven practices from real life. These core practices come from over three-dozen superachievers who we interviewed for “The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It Well,” including actor Alec Baldwin, Zappos’s CEO Tony Hsieh, sports icon Yogi Berra, Dog Whisperer Cesar Millan, and Laura Linney.

No matter what field these extraordinary people mastered, whether it was business, the arts, entertainment, sports, science or technology, we found that these practices have been key to their success. You, too, can apply them to your own work and career.

LEARN FROM FAILURE: You may not realize it but you will fail. And fail frequently. You’ll fail more than you’ll succeed. And the higher you set your sights the more you’ll fail. But failure is the best teacher. Ask Bill Gross a serial entrepreneur who has made a science of learning from failure. Gross is founder of Idealab, a business incubator that has started nearly a hundred companies with earnings of over a billion dollars. Gross told us the story of how he created eToys, an online toy store, in 1997. Within a couple of years, eToys was experiencing explosive growth. By 1999, sales were projected to increase by 800 percent to $300 million. Except that they didn’t. The tech bubble burst. Although eToys sales were phenomenal, they were only half of what had been projected. And since the company had overspent so wildly in anticipation of the holiday season, the business went bust. But Gross learned a valuable lesson. Markets can change on a dime, so no matter how rosy the future may look, don’t overextend yourself financially or you may not make it though the next business cycle. Of course, since then, Gross has gone on to see his fair share of start-up failures mixed in with the successes. But with each failure he learns about what didn’t work and makes sure that he does not repeat the same mistake. Whether you go into business, law, sports or the arts, one of the greatest courses you will ever take will be taught to you by the failures of your life. And if you pay attention, these lessons will stick with you forever.

BUILD A COMMUNITY: In order to achieve success, you’ll need to reach out to others and rely on them. So, get over your pride. Whether you’re starting a business, a rock band or going for an entry-level job, tap anybody and everybody to find contacts in your field. Build your connections. Cultivate relationships that could lead to mentoring. Each superachiever we spoke to described a community of people that they had built up, that was unique to their particular endeavor. These communities might include friends, mentors, investors, colleagues, customers, fans, sometimes even, competitors. You can think of a community as a group of people who will have a stake in your success. Jessica Watson was only 11-years old when she first got the idea to sail around the world—alone. She told us that she had no connections, no experience, no family funding and even described herself a “fraidy cat.” But at an age when most tweens are concerned with getting the latest smart phone or planning the next slumber party, Watson understood that in order to make her dream come true, she’d need help. A lot of it. She wrote to newspaper reporters to spread her story. Each mentor she found connected her to others. She went to boatyards and marinas to find sailors and boat owners, willing to teach her and take her on board to work for free to learn about sailing, rigging, navigation and meteorology. As her journey became more of a reality she needed to find sponsors to buy her a boat and equipment. Because of this young girl’s ability to bring together friends, family and strangers to donate time, expertise, and emotional support, she was able to make her 7-month solo journey around the world at 16. No man (or 16 year old girl) is an island. And there’s no better time than now to start building a community to help you get to where you want to go.

TELL YOUR STORY: Unless you’re already a YouTube sensation not many people know who you are. So what will make you stand out among the bazillions of other people vying for the same job or grant or whatever you’re pursuing? Numerous studies have shown that a well-crafted and compelling story engages the reader (or viewer or listener) far more than a set of facts. To tell your story, you first need to clarify who you are, what it is you want and what you have to offer. Once you know this, you can shape that information into a compelling story that can help you get the attention of whoever you’re approaching, whether it’s a potential mentor, employer or group of Kickstarter contributors. Take the power pop band OK Go. Their dream was to make it big. But after some early success, their record sales were floundering. Rather than to continue to communicate with their fans through their record company’s outdated mode of publicity, they decided to tell their story their own way. They created a DIY, one-take music video of themselves, dancing on treadmills for their song, “Here We Go Again.” It was the first intentionally viral YouTube video. It got millions of hits, won them a best video Grammy award and captured the public’s attention. And OK Go keeps upping the ante. They have gone on to create many multi-media collaborative art projects and mind-bending videos that tell the story of the band and their music to the public. The takeaway? Find creative and compelling ways to shape your story to communicate to people who can help you along your path.

MANAGE YOUR EMOTIONS: Early on in your professional life, you can be derailed by the emotional ups and downs. You might be freaked out by financial insecurity or harbor resentment for being the office coffee fetcher with an Ivy League education. You may feel anger, frustration or despair on a daily basis. But overcoming emotional struggles, we found, was key to the success of the high achievers we spoke with. Whatever they felt— anxiety, hubris, insecurity, shame, disappointment or pride—they didn’t allow their emotions to trigger actions that would compromise their goals. Instead they had the commitment to examine those emotions and figure out effective ways to cope with them. Gary Noesner, a former FBI chief negotiator, told us about the vocational life of a hostage negotiator. Imagine facing off with a cold-blooded killer or a murderous cult leader. Suppose the only thing standing between these violent crazies and innocent lives were you. Noesner told us that under those condition the most important trait of a negotiator is not to be a militaristic die-hard but to exercise emotional self-control. In fact Neosner’s job involved building empathy and rapport with irrational hostage takers in order to help them figure out what they were feeling. Why? Because that was the surest path to Noesner’s goal of a non-violent resolution. Although you may sometimes feel like the people you are dealing with are as crazy as Noesner’s criminal counterparts, learning to observe your emotions objectively and monitor them effectively even when faced with a maddening boss, malicious co-worker or bumpy career path can put you at a tremendous advantage.

PURSUE YOUR PASSION: Studies have shown that being happy in a job can make you more productive. And so it was for the extraordinary people that we interviewed, who explained that happiness itself wasn’t their goal, it was the pursuit of happiness that actually made them happy and productive. One of the greatest examples of this was Ken Jennings, the winningest game show contestant in history, who won millions of dollars on Jeopardy!. Jennings, a self-described trivia nerd, had a lifelong dream of being on the show. But he told us that when he first graduated from college with an English Lit degree and a dream of writing, he believed that no matter how much you loved something, it wasn’t worth pursuing if it wasn’t going to pay the bills. So he got a job as a computer programmer. He didn’t audition for Jeopardy! until he was nearly 30. Once on the show, Jennings had an epiphany. Being a contestant on Jeopardy!, made him feel for the first time like someone who actually loved his “job.” And the passion that came from that not only contributed to his winning game after game but helped him see that “doing something you love really can change your life.” After his winning streak (the longest in Jeopardy! history), Jennings pursued his dream job of becoming a writer. “Now,” he told us, “I love what I do every day.” Anything you pursue in life will involve struggle, hardship and sacrifice. But if that thing you are chasing is what you love, you will have the motivation to get through the tough times. And of course like Jennings and all of the other superachievers we spoke to, you will have the deep satisfaction of loving what you do every day.

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Original Art by Edel Rodriguez for The Art of Doing Artist’s Interpretation Project

HE’S BEEN IN THE BUSINESS FOR 60 YEARS, AND IS STILL GOING STRONG. THE FOUNDER AND SHAMANISTIC FRONTMAN OF THE SEMINAL FUNK BANDS PARLIAMENT-FUNKADELIC AND THE P-FUNK ALL STARS REFLECTS ON HIS LONG CAREER, AND SHARES LESSONS HE’S LEARNED ALONG THE WAY.

George Clinton was born in an outhouse in North Carolina in 1941.

At 13 he persuaded four friends to form a doo-wop band, the Parliaments. Years later Clinton moved the band to Detroit to try to get signed by Motown. But it was too late. The ’60s, with its cacophonous rock ’n’ roll, race riots and psychedelic drugs, had changed Clinton. “One day I put on a sheet and cut my hair in a Mohawk and walked around town,” he said. “I thought if nobody kicks my ass or arrests me, we’re gonna take this craziness to the stage.”

Within a couple of years, Clinton had become a grand funk provocateur. Under his management style of anarchistic humanitarianism, the musicians of his sprawling funk collective have flowed in and out of the bands that Clinton formed, splintered and merged, putting on outrageous shows and recording music that reflected America’s counterculture and black consciousness. Now in his 70s and still touring with the P-Funk All Stars, Clinton’s musical legacy that began in the era of doo-wop is a still a staple of the era of hip hop. Prince once said of Clinton, “They should give that man a government grant for being so funky.”

1. Someone has to be the ringleader. I was always pushing something. I was just a kid when I started our little doo-wop group, the Parliaments because we were all in love with Motown. I’d go into New York City, knocking on doors to try and make the deals. After we got our hit “(I wanna) Testify,” I moved the band out to Detroit because I wanted us to be the Temptations. Years later we had so many people coming and going on different labels with different acts, I got us our own studio and label. Sure it felt like responsibility, but the guys always left it for me to do all the business stuff. Someone’s got to be in control and if you know what you want, it might as well be you.

2. Grab what you like and bring your own thing. Keep your eye on what’s happening. By the late ’60s, Motown was going pop and that wasn’t right for us. The white boys–Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones–were playing the hell out of the blues so they were able to own it. We missed out on that. I made sure we weren’t going to miss out on the funk. Funk was the future, We took the discipline of Motown. We took the blues and speeded it up. We added the psychedelic sounds and made it chewy. We took the hard stuff of MC5 and the Stooges, the churchy stuff, the R&B stuff, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Eric Clapton, the Beatles–and we were all of them at once. We mixed it all up and called it funk.

3. Free your mind. In the ’60s, acid and the hippies busted things wide open. [But] we were going to deliver our message our way, to the black community. On the records we’d just talk about the shit that was going on–inequality, greed, corporatism, the war taking our babies and drugs turning people’s minds into maggot brains. It’s not that we were into preaching. We were just into having people think. And if the people didn’t want to listen, the music was good enough that they could just bump.

4. Take it to the stage. Around the mid ’70s, I saw that bands were coming up with theater concepts like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, the Who’s Tommy and even Hair on Broadway. So when we started looking at some real money I told our record company, “Get me a spaceship.” I wanted to make a funk opera with Afronauts coming from outer space–our version of Sgt. Pepper. I knew it would really blow some minds. The other guys in the band wanted houses and cars with the money we were making but I told them, “As soon as we stop making hit records they’ll repossess our cars, but they can’t repossess the Mothership!” We had a designer from Broadway make us a spaceship for $275,000. We landed it in Times Square and again in front of the United Nations. Then we went out on a monster tour, playing the big, sold-out arenas.

5. Create characters. The thing about characters is they live longer than people. Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Mickey Mouse—they’re ageless. I started creating strange characters in about ’75–Dr. Funkenstein, Sir Nose d’Voidoffunk, Mr. Wiggles, Starchild–as part of an ongoing black cosmic funk opera. These characters were different incarnations of us and you can keep being them cause the other thing about characters is, you don’t have to be young and sexy to play one.

6. Listen to Feedback. One night in St. Louis before we came out we heard the audience chanting, “We want the funk. We want the funk.” I turned to someone and said, “Damn, we gotta put that on a record.” We put it in “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)” and it became our first certified platinum single. We let our fans know, “You hear us. We hear you back.”

7. Stick together. By the mid-’70s we already had so many artists playing in so many bands and record deals on different labels, I had to maintain that friendship thing with all of them. The minute they have to make appointments to see you, it’s all over. A band is a family. You fight, fuss, kiss, love, and make up and start all over again. And if anybody gets in trouble, we’re all going to stick with that person no matter what. They’re all our little brothers and sisters, all the people who grew up together. If you’ve ever been in the Funk, you’re in it forever.

8. Don’t go crazy (offstage). The advice I’d tell a young musician is play crazy, act crazy, but don’t ever go crazy for real. You can spend so much energy worrying about what people can do to you that you don’t have the energy to do your thing. Your feelings are the one thing you can take control of. I survived cause when things would get crazy, I’d think, “Okay, I’m not going to go crazy. I’ll do another thing.” And it’s worked so far.

9. Keep chasing the dream. It’s easy to get tired in your 70′s, but I’m not successful yet. There’s always more ground to cover. If you get to the top and catch up with happy, you got a real problem because you’ll get bored. I’m not trying to catch up with being happy—because it’s the pursuit of happiness I’m after. I want to be so close behind it I can almost touch it. That’s what keeps me looking forward to moving ahead.

–Excerpted by Fast Company by arrangement with Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from “The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well” by Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield. Copyright 2013 by Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield.

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The COOP at Harvard Square on Tuesday June 18th at 7 PM.

Please join us!

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In an interview for a chapter on “How to Create a Mind-Bending Crossword Puzzle” in our book Shortz told us:

“We’re faced with problems every day in life, and most of them don’t have clear-cut solutions, so we just muddle through the best we can and move on to the next thing. But with a crossword, we’re challenging ourselves to create order out of chaos. Although you might think, ‘Boy, this is hard and I don’t really have time for it,’ it gives you a rush to fill in those last letters, and immediately . . . you want to do it again.”

 

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David Chang’s experience is instructive.

Mr. Chang is an internationally renowned, award-winning Korean-American chef, restaurateur and owner of the Momofuku restaurant group with eight restaurants from Toronto to Sydney, and other thriving enterprises, including bakeries and bars, a PBS TV show, guest spots on HBO’s “Treme” and a foodie magazine, Lucky Peach. He says he worked himself to the bone to realize his dream — to own a humble noodle bar.

He spent years cooking in some of New York City’s best restaurants, apprenticed in different noodle shops in Japan and then, finally, worked 18-hour days in his tiny restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar.

Mr. Chang could barely pay himself a salary. He had trouble keeping staff. And he was miserably stressed.

He recalls a low moment when he went with his staff on a night off to eat burgers at a restaurant that was everything his wasn’t — packed, critically acclaimed and financially successful. He could cook better than they did, he thought, so why was his restaurant failing? “I couldn’t figure out what the hell we were doing wrong,” he told us.

Mr. Chang could have blamed someone else for his troubles, or worked harder (though available evidence suggests that might not have been possible) or he could have made minor tweaks to the menu. Instead he looked inward and subjected himself to brutal self-assessment.

Was the humble noodle bar of his dreams economically viable? Sure, a traditional noodle dish had its charm but wouldn’t work as the mainstay of a restaurant if he hoped to pay his bills.

Mr. Chang changed course. Rather than worry about what a noodle bar should serve, he and his cooks stalked the produce at the greenmarket for inspiration. Then they went back to the kitchen and cooked as if it was their last meal, crowding the menu with wild combinations of dishes they’d want to eat — tripe and sweetbreads, headcheese and flavor-packed culinary mashups like a Korean-style burrito. What happened next Mr. Chang still considers “kind of ridiculous” — the crowds came, rave reviews piled up, awards followed and unimaginable opportunities presented themselves.

During the 1970s, Chris Argyris, a business theorist at Harvard Business School (and now, at 89, a professor emeritus) began to research what happens to organizations and people, like Mr. Chang, when they find obstacles in their paths.

Professor Argyris called the most common response single loop learning — an insular mental process in which we consider possible external or technical reasons for obstacles.

LESS common but vastly more effective is the cognitive approach that Professor Argyris called double-loop learning. In this mode we — like Mr. Chang — question every aspect of our approach, including our methodology, biases and deeply held assumptions. This more psychologically nuanced self-examination requires that we honestly challenge our beliefs and summon the courage to act on that information, which may lead to fresh ways of thinking about our lives and our goals.

In interviews we did with high achievers for a book, we expected to hear that talent, persistence, dedication and luck played crucial roles in their success. Surprisingly, however, self-awareness played an equally strong role.

The successful people we spoke with — in business, entertainment, sports and the arts — all had similar responses when faced with obstacles: they subjected themselves to fairly merciless self-examination that prompted reinvention of their goals and the methods by which they endeavored to achieve them.

The tennis champion Martina Navratilova, for example, told us that after a galling loss to Chris Evert in 1981, she questioned her assumption that she could get by on talent and instinct alone. She began a long exploration of every aspect of her game. She adopted a rigorous cross-training practice (common today but essentially unheard of at the time), revamped her diet and her mental and tactical game and ultimately transformed herself into the most successful women’s tennis player of her era.

The indie rock band OK Go described how it once operated under the business model of the 20th-century rock band. But when industry record sales collapsed and the band members found themselves creatively hamstrung by their recording company, they questioned their tactics. Rather than depend on their label, they made wildly unconventional music videos, which went viral, and collaborative art projects with companies like Google, State Farm and Range Rover, which financed future creative endeavors. The band now releases albums on its own label.

No one’s idea of a good time is to take a brutal assessment of their animating assumptions and to acknowledge that those may have contributed to their failure. It’s easy to find pat ways to explain why the world has not adequately rewarded our efforts. But what we learned from conversation with high achievers is that challenging our assumptions, objectives, at times even our goals, may sometimes push us further than we thought possible. Ask David Chang, who never imagined that sweetbreads and duck sausage rice cakes with kohlrabi and mint would find their way beside his humble noodle dishes — and make him a star.

Read the story in the Times here

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Frequency is the currency of a word cloud. The more a word is repeated, the larger it appears in the cloud. Click here to see the interactive version.

This word cloud is based on our interview with Mark Frauenfelder, co-founder and co-editor of one of our favorite blogs (for a chapter in our book on “How to Create One of the World’s Most Popular Blogs). Frauenfelder’s iconoclastic BoingBoing (whose motto is Brain Candy for Happy Mutants) has been firing out a melange of digital innovation, DIY creations and wacked-out art for a decade and a half. (Already in blog years, several life cycles long.) What we see in Frauenfelder’s word cloud is his focus is not on market share, metrics or SEO, but on building a community of people by writing interesting and amazing posts rooted in real life that will connect with the reader.

Simply put, as Frauenfelder told us:

“The Internet is a connection machine.”

BoingBoing has resisted the urge to sell out to any corporate entity looking to buy some online cred. Instead, Frauenfelder, and his increasing band of BoingBoing coeditors, keep true to his original mission to:

“Make the blog that doesn’t exist yet, but that you’d want to read.”

Good advice for any blogger.

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Yogi Berra, considered one of baseball’s greatest catchers of all time, was the linchpin of the New York Yankees dynasties from 1946 to 1960 and holds the record for playing on the most World Series Championship teams ever. You might assume from his head-scratching Yogi-isms (“It’s déjà vu all over again!” “I really didn’t say everything I said.”) that Berra approached the game from an oddball perspective. But from our interview with him for our book on a chapter about “How to Make It as a Major-Leaguer,” we were surprised to learn that Berra’s astounding on-field success was rooted in clear-eyed realism.

Although his dream was always to be a Major Leaguer, Berra’s path to the big leagues was never assured. Like any athlete aspiring to make it as a professional, the percentages were against him. Berra’s awkward style of play put off scouts for Major League teams. After four years in the minors and a stint serving in the Navy during WW II, Berra was finally called up by the New York Yankees. But to remain on the team he had to work hard to switch from the outfield to catcher, a position that did not come naturally to him.

In today’s age of young phenoms hardly old enough to legally enter a bar, who are showered with multi-million dollar advances and faced with exorbitant media pressure and outsized expectations of hometown fans, many flame out before meeting their potential. Who knows how many of those talented young players could have been helped by some of the practical, common sense rules that Berra applied to his own career? As Berra told us:

“No success comes overnight. Being a successful ballplayer means you better be as committed as can be. Better be prepared to deal with rejection. And better be willing to make adjustments. I was strongly motivated from within, and willing to do whatever it took.”

Although business gurus, life coaches and self-help books can at times fill us with a dizzying array of contradictory advice on advancing in our careers, we could do well to apply Berra’s down-to-earth advice to our own lives and dreams:

“At some point you have to figure it [your dream] may never happen. But if you don’t give up, work as hard as anyone, you never know.”

Yogi Facts: Berra was named the Most Valuable Player of the American League 3 times. He holds the record for appearing in 14 World Series and winning 10 championships. As a player, coach, or manager, he appeared in 21 World Series. In 1972, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

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Diane Cardwell New York Times Reporter surfing in Rockaway Beach. Photo by Josh Gosfield

For our blog we’ve wanted to write about some of the people we’ve come across who have changed their lives in profound or unexpected ways. Diane Cardwell is one of them.

If you had met Diane Cardwell just a few years ago, you would have thought her life was perfect with the prestigious job as a reporter at The New York Times, the handsome, ambitious, NGO-ish husband, the beautiful Brooklyn Brownstone they actually owned and land upstate to build their dream home someday. But when her marriage fell apart, Diane told us, her life no longer made sense to her.

Ejecting from that comfortable existence, Diane did some of the more predictably unpredictable things: She had a fling, took a sabbatical and went cross-country (and drove back alone), camped out in Death Valley, had another fling, accepted rides on the back of motorcycles and began to closely examine her life, wondering, as she put it,

“What to do with this thing, this life that I held in my hands and for the first time in a long time felt like was mine alone to direct?”

One afternoon while on assignment for the Times, watching the surfers off Montauk on New York’s Long Island, Diane said to herself, “I think I could do that.” And Diane being Diane, she followed through.

Now two years later, she’s traded in the Brooklyn Brownstone for a tiny fixer-upper beach bungalow in Rockaway, a New York City community as far from Manhattan culturally as it is geographically with its lack of services, funky, ethnically-mixed blue collar populace, Popeye-like shanty bungalows, looming housing projects and surfers attracted by what they call its “finicky” wave.

Starting to surf in her 40’s has forced Diane to abandon her usual aim for perfection. Her surfing goal, she says, is to one day just be okay. But being by the beach in the ocean has reconnected her to something that she hadn’t even realized she’d lost—a profound sense of happiness she’d felt at the beach with her mother when she was a kid.

Now Diane goes out several mornings a week before her 90-minute commute to work. Gradually, she’s been welcomed into the ragtag Rockaway surf community with a plot in the community garden and invites to Surf Movie Night that’s projected on a wall. And when Hurricane Sandy tore through the area, causing fires, floods (submerging Diane’s basement—her boiler and electrical panel—up to the ceiling) and knocking out power in the area for what was to be weeks, Diane waded across the current in the street to a neighbor’s and rode out the storm with new friends.

Diane, like others, could have left the area post-storm, but she didn’t. She said, in fact, she is even more invested in her new life:

“I realized that out here we’re all connected in one way or another with this thing, the ocean, and that being part of the community has really changed me. On a personal level it’s made me have to break out of my weird solipsistic shell and learn to ask for things, ask for help, relate to people in a new way.”

 

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The Art of Doing Artist’s Interpretation project is a collaboration between us and imaginative artists we’ve chosen to depict the superachievers in our book.

Since we think artist Michael Wertz’s work is brilliant, we asked him to create a piece of art about one of our superachievers. Because of Wertz’s love of all things extraterrestrial—from his childhood pillowcase covered in cosmic Peter Max imagery to the Carpenters’ ode to space, “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”—he jumped at the chance to depict astronomer Jill Tarter, one the world’s most prominent alien hunters. (Chapter 15 in our book on “How to Find Extraterrestrial Life.”)

The term alien hunter might conjure up images of Roswellian conspiracy theorists or UFOlogists, scanning the skies for sleek hovering spaceships and little green men, but astronomer Jill Tarter is far from that. Tarter is a TED prize-winning leader at the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) where a team of scientists at the Hat Creek Observatory in Northern California operates a powerful telescope array in the world’s most technologically advanced search for signs of life in the universe.

Tarter’s devotion to this search is not just to satisfy her curiosity. She is also an evangelist. She believes that rather than to define ourselves by our differences, whether Christian vs. Muslim, Republican vs. Democrat, the search for intelligent life beyond ourselves reminds us of what binds us together, that all humans are members of the same tribe—earthlings. Tarter told us:

“I hope that if SETI does nothing else it will change the perspective of humans on this planet. That would be one of the most profound endeavors in history.”

SETI Fact: You don’t have to be astronomer to join in the search. SETI has created seti@home, a citizen scientists’ project where individuals can help analyze the data that SETI’s telescope array collects from the heavens

Jill Tarter Fact: Jodie Foster’s character, alien hunter Ellie Arroway in the 1997 movie Contact was inspired by Tarter’s life. In 2011, when SETI was forced to shutdown operations due to lack of funds, Foster, along with many other private donors, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep it going.

“Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”: The Carpenters’ version of the song was actually a cover of the original by the band Klaatu that in turn was inspired by a message from the International Flying Saucer Bureau, which in 1953 sent out a bulletin to all members urging them to participate in World Contact Day, whereby at a predetermined time, they’d collectively send out a telepathic message to visitors from outer space that began, “Calling occupants of interplanetary craft!” The Carpenters’ version spurred another cover, a mash-up, a dub version and of course, what’s a hit song without a version acted out by puppets?

Buy “The Art of Doing” here. Signup for “The Art of Doing” free weekly e-newsletter. Follow us on Twitter. Join “The Art of Doing” Facebook Community.  If you’ve read “The Art of Doing” please take a moment to leave a review here.