Elite Team

If you want to be part of an Elite Team, you first have to accept the idea that there are people that aren’t good enough. You have to accept the possibility that you aren’t good enough. That there is someone who deserves your spot more than you. If you push the idea of Meritocracy to its extreme, and believe in surrounding yourself with the best, you need to be consistent. You need to listen to that voice in your head that asks if you are good enough. The impostor syndrome that makes you feel inadequate. That means you have never reached the goal. Elite Teams aren’t about the individuals. They are about the Team. They require sharp knives. Personally, I don’t want to be part of an Elite Team. I don’t care if you think I am enough. I don’t find the question of whether you are enough interesting. What interests me is your incentives. Your passions. The way you create meaning. What interests me is the way you connect to others. What you do every day. That is enough.

Are you the best?

Cutting Slack

One of my habitual sources of anxiety is the desire to “get it right”. I hate feeling like I have wronged someone – intentionally or not. In the workplace, this often led to me seeking permission by getting something right “in theory” first. The problem is theory and practice always turn out differently. Asking forgiveness (and cutting people some slack) is often far more effective than seeking permission. If we aren’t generous in our forgiveness, both to ourselves and others, it can be debilitating. A hesitancy can creep in where you feel the need to either ask first, or step back for the person (whose judgement you fear) to do it themselves. We all get things wrong. It is a fundamental part of learning, adjusting, adapting, accommodating, interpreting, and creatively dancing with what the world throws at us. The challenge is developing the skills of interpretative charity (assume people intend well) and the gift of the benefit of doubt (no one gets everything right – focus on the point people are making rather than the holes). The double challenge is being as kind to yourself as you try be to others.

Starting Point

The starting point for meaningful engagement is kindness and respect. This isn't the same thing as endorsing the views of the other person. Kindness is being friendly, generous and considerate. Giving someone the benefit of the doubt, and interpreting the things they say in the best possible way your worldview reasonably allows. That is hard when people wind you up. Respect doesn't mean endorsement either. Respect is a feeling of admiration for something in them - a quality, an ability, an achievement. Something that you see in them, that you value. That they have that you don't. If you can't see that in someone, then you probably don't know them well enough to have permission to attack.

Naturally none of this matters if you don't actually care about that person, or the community of which you are both a part. If your intent is just grandstanding your opinion and signalling that you belong to a different tribe to that person. If someone has a crazy view, and you care - it is probably because they are part of the community you care about. That means that crazy view belongs to you. You 'have' that crazy view. If your definition of self is in any way connected to that community.

The really substantial conversations happen when people feel safe. Not a safe space for ideas, but a safe space for vulnerability. Bad ideas should never be safe. We should however make space for everyone. Create space for all of us to air our ugly bits so they can die. Without killing everything we care about in the process.

Pyrrhic Victory

Weeding Contempt

Paul Eckman is a Psychologist who studies the link between emotions and facial expressions. He believes the single best predictor of whether a relationship will fail is contempt. Without even hearing what someone is saying, silent video clips of couples talking can help him predict whether that couple will stay together. I believe in weeding for contempt. Not just in intimate relationships. The second there is contempt between any two people, get rid of it. Fast. 

The two weed killers I employ are 'Benefit of the Doubt' and 'Interpretive Charity'. Doubt is natural and everything we say and do, has holes. Benefit of the Doubt allows for that, and looks for the good. Interpretive Charity means that when someone does something, and there are multiple interpretations, choose the best version. These tools don't make you a sucker. Doubt gets removed, and sometimes there are no positive interpretations. Then it is a good time for that relationship to die. Until then, keep weeding and let the good stuff grow.

Paul Ekman

Interpretive Charity

Sake

In a discussion, the principle of charity requires interpreting what you hear in its best, strongest way. It is related to Bull Quota & Benefit of Doubt. A Bull Quota requires parking the stuff you disagree with until you have really understood the story. Giving the Benefit of Doubt requires believing the best in people unless you have strong evidence otherwise.  Interpretative Charity maximises the possibility that you can find agreement. It assumes your intent is to find agreement, and isn't to break arguments down and 'win'. A skilled debater can win any argument, and create a loser. A thriving community is built by finding the strongest possible common ground we can. Intent matters. What you do matters.

The sake of argument

Managing Expectations

We view the world relative to our expectations. Some believe you need to visualise success in order to achieve it. Remove doubt. The steps towards your goals will materialise. Others will take the opposite approach. Visualise (not wish for) the worst case scenario. If you know you have the strength to cope with that, then anything else is a bonus. Remove fear. Any good fortune is worth celebrating, rather than being disappointed with what could have been achieved. It is worth practicing detachment. That doesn't mean not caring. Detachment is separating your identity from the thing, task, emotion or event. Identity is just a story. Stories connect to each other. They get retold. It is the telling that matters. The moving. The relationships. Don't be your goals.

Marcus Aurelius

The Stoic Emperor

Going Dark

I want to trust people. My natural disposition is to give people the benefit of the doubt. I find if I assume the best intentions, then I can listen more closely to points they are making. If I get triggered by words, I normally try rein in my raging elephant, and after a few breaths assume they meant something different to what I think they meant. In an ideal world, I believe if you give people unconditional love the relationship will be stronger, because they won't have to fear you walking away. Unfortunately, the people closest to us are those who know how to hurt us most. Unconditional can be brutal. So occasionally, it is useful to 'Go Dark' and think of the worst case scenario. If you can gain comfort that you can survive that, that you can cope, then the darkness will not kill you. Then you can trust.

Bane

Quality and Quantity

I have been lucky enough to be invited into the homes of a number of my friends and family since I started writing full time. Quality v Quantity time with people? I think the answer is both. There are some things we can't communicate over a single meal. I would still take a catch up meal with people I haven't seen in ages. A group get together. A wedding. The truth is that there isn't enough time at those events to relax together. I often walk away feeling nostalgic for when we saw each other regularly, rather than having got my fix.

Kids have a habit of saying things as they see them. Sometimes nasty. Sometimes funny. 'Look at that really fat lady' says lightie within earshot of really fat lady. Queue a disgruntled snipe to the parent about teaching their child manners. They also have healthy stranger danger when meeting people for the first time. They need to get to know someone on their own terms. When you get to spend a bit more time with the children, your impression isn't based on one little incident. The well mannered child occasionally says something inappropriate. The difficult child occasionally has a golden afternoon.

Is this Quantity or Quality time?

We can give too much information to single interactions with people. In reality our characters are wonderfully complex. Couples who have been together for years will still be learning about how they react. Last time doesn't mean every time. I think relationships are in a large part the gift of 'the benefit of doubt'.

One of my friends has a child with Autism. He said that 'if you know one child with Autism, you know one child with Autism'. Each child is unique. Parents learn a bespoke set of skills. I listen to his story with incredible admiration. Raising children is difficult enough already. Parents just desperately want to do the right thing. But it is hard. And they are human. Adding complications requires incredible strength. One of the lessons he said he has learnt is to give the benefit of doubt to other people. Whether it is them having a bad day, or their child having a bad day, or whatever the mistake is.

Behind the scenes, most of us have difficulties we are working through. We have emotional wobbles. Things feel like they are getting too much. We can cover it up to be functional most of the time. By adding some 'quantity time' to relationships we get the chance to see more of the story. We get a chance to be a part of the story. To walk together.

With the benefit of doubt and some time, stories have depth, character and meaning. Life is richer.

Global Apartheid

We have a tentative grasp on the mysteries of our own lives. We often struggle to understand the workings of the mind of the single closest person to us. Doing so requires patience, benefit of the doubt, kindness and time. Then our families drive us crazy. Our work place becomes a source of rage when it doesn't go our way. Our communities require constant learning as the evolve away from the ones we thought we understood. Our nations baffle us. And the world remains a distant, foreign place we often put out of our minds because our local problems are overflowing. Yet we are confident in our views.

No one understands. Tim Urban looks at 'Horizontal History' which shows just how important seemingly unrelated context is to absolutely everything. The way we see the world depends on so many threads weaving together. No one else sees the world like you do. Hop in a time machine and go back to a pivotal point in your life, and you will not see the world the way you saw it then.

I don't feel I have a grasp on the big issues facing the world. The two most powerful ideas I think would make a difference are very simple. The first is that I think borders are not morally justifiable in terms of stopping the flow of people. The second is that I think there should be a Universal Income. The first is a political issue, but the second is not. 

Give Directly shows that it is possible to redistribute income in a voluntary, transparent and efficient way. We don't need to protest and force governments to raise taxes to do this. There are enough people with more than they need, who argue that taxes should be higher, who could be contributing. We don't need the people who don't want to give. Talk is cheap, we just need to get on with it.

The economic argument in favour of free migration of people is strong. The moral argument is even stronger.  The most complete summary of the issues I have found is on the Stanford University Philosophy Portal, plato.stanford.edu/entries/immigration.

Borders enforce Global Apartheid

What the ability to move and a basic income do, is empower people to make decisions where the most undistorted information lies. It requires trusting people. It requires listening to people and partnering with them rather than claiming confidently that we understand the issues of others, when we don't even understand our own. And like the closest relationships in our lives it requires patience, benefit of doubt, kindness and time.

Not Knowing

I used to have a sign on my door at university that said 'I know only two things, the first is that there is a God, the second is that I am not him.' It came from a scene in the movie The Boondock Saints. The Priest was a doubting Thomas and was telling the person speaking to him that that was okay. This resonated with me at the time. I had become increasingly uncomfortable with some of the divisive issues in religion around the world. 

The Boondock Saints

My friend Phil (one of the Oozers) used to give me grief about it, saying I was wrong about both! Many believe that the idea of God is beyond our understanding. How we choose to grasp it is imperfect. The Yogis call it Ishvara. A way of fitting God into our understanding. Something we can verbalise and imagine, which is as close as we can get. Vedantic philosophy describes God (imperfectly) as Sat-chit-ananda meaning knowledge-existence-bliss. Basically everything. So Phil's argument was that there 'is a God' implies a separateness from me that is not there. This isn't just an Eastern idea. Two formative books for me in my late teens were 'Sophie's World' and 'Life of Pi'. Sophie discovers her name derives from Philosophy. Love of knowledge. That knowledge is the female personification of God. The personification of everything. This fit perfectly into my burgeoning feminist world view. Life of Pi showed a boy constantly discovering new truths in other people's stories.

There are actually three parts to the Boondock Statement. The first is 'I know only two things'. I have refined all three to the only conviction I have is that 'you can't know'. Rich challenges this in our ongoing discussion about faith. What about Rape/ Poverty/ Paedophilia as unacceptable things? What about Love and Listening as good things? Aren't these convictions? I do think you can build a set of guidance for living more meaningful lives. I am a big believer in rule of law. I think there are things we are almost 100% sure about. I do believe that you can be wrong. Many of the reasons for things being right or wrong are deeply wired into us. Jonathan Haidt explores how this can lead to conflict in 'Righteous Minds: Why good people are divided by religion and politics'.

There is an idea that 'letting go of God' would result in a lawless world. A state where everyone does their own thing. Truths that matter transcend the ways we try get to them. Stoics in Greece and Rome and the Buddha in the East come to the same conclusions. Christian monks study Muslim philosophy. Beautiful analogies come out of the Bhagavad Gita. Scientists chip away at the workings of nature and physics which releases its own magic as full understanding lies beyond the boundaries of our human abilities. 

Not knowing is a firmer foundation than believing falsely that you do.

Benefit of Doubt

Life is more inspiring and fulfilling if you give people the benefit of the doubt. When someone does something that irritates, exasperates, hurts or confuses us, the temptation is to think their intentions are based on our knowledge. How could they possibly have done that if they are a good/ intelligent/ caring person? We have limited attention and memories. We have conflicting goals and inconsistent beliefs. Very seldom are people's intentions malicious. Like watching a movie, it helps to suspend disbelief. People make mistakes, but it is often not for the reasons we think. We can cut each other some slack.

Carte Blanche Problem

When last did you experience the 'Carte Blanche' problem? Carte Blanche is a South African Investigative Journalism series originally released in 1988 focusing on corruption, consumer issues and current events. I loved watching it and got riled up cheering for the good guy as Derek Watts stormed from issue to issue to shine a light on it.

Normally I didn't know much about the industry or issue being covered. I may have had a casual, passing, popular understanding but the show told me what was what. They framed the issue, handed me the pitchfork and torch and then released my righteous indignation. Awesome. There is nothing better than having a bad guy to direct our cumulative pissed offness at.

Occasionally the show would focus on issues I knew a little bit more about. Kind of like when you watch Grey's Anatomy with a bunch of doctors. Don't watch Grey's Anatomy with a bunch of doctors. The script writers don't let real medicine get in the way of a good story. Doctors tend to get really irritated with the holes. They watch anyway because we all enjoy a good whine, but they prick the suspension of disbelief. When Carte Blanche attacked an issue where I thought there were aspects that were being missed, I wondered if that was always the case? I just didn't know about the holes when it was outside my area of expertise.

Robert Nozick said 'There is room for words on subjects other than last words'. We may be tempted to try and do all our thinking in private before we plonk. This hides our doubts and gives us that confidence that we can't help but find attractive. We should find doubt attractive, but in a world that is overwhelmingly confusing, someone who appears to have it figured out is very appealing. Donald Trump seems to have a surprising amount of support. Not because his views are coherent, but because he has swagger. Confidence opens ears.

There are lots of unanswered questions, and most of the answered questions have Carte Blanche problems. The people in the know will see the holes.

The best we can do is keep asking.

Catching a Hoodwink (by Phillipa Norman)

Guest Post: Phillipa Norman

Some friends connect to such a degree that the distinction between family and friends melts away. I love the term family friends. The Blacks and the Normans were such friends growing up. I can remember watching Nelson Mandela's release sitting on one of their super awesome bean bags. I loved those things. Dad Norman used to wrestle us in the pool. He was a man mountain. Mom Norman made the most awesome milk tart in the world. Phillipa was young enough to reliably be called upon to expose her brothers hiding places when it came to hide and go seek. The Normans invaded the land of the long white cloud in the early 00's. In 2011, I ventured to that spiritual home of rugby to see the World Cup and catch up with the adult versions of my childhood buddies. It was there that I met Sam who will become Graham's wife shortly. I am heading out again on Sunday to join the festivities and then to hang around for a couple of months down under.

Phillipa has developed the art of hide and seek to a new level as part of the Judges' Research Counsel at the Christchurch District Court. She tells us some of her secrets...

With the Boks out, Pip & I chose Wales and Sam & Graham Australia in the fight for 3rd

Catching a Hoodwink
by Phillipa Norman

My friends and I are huge fans of the TV programme Broadchurch. On our weekly Sunday night views of Season 2, I regularly get told-off for pointing out the inaccuracies in criminal trial procedure and admissibility of evidence - "it's a TV show, suspend disbelief!"

A major premise of the show is that you as the viewer don't know who is lying and who is telling the truth (this also frustrates David Tennant). Watching actors try to convey the nuance of a character does actually reflect a major concern in the real world and the bread and butter of law courts, that is, whether someone is a liar. These impressions, whether they are in our everyday lives, professional or business worlds or in the jury box, can be high stakes, as in the case of a defendant's liberty, or comparably minor and domestic - has your child really finished their homework?

We have several tools to assess a person's truthfulness (veracity), credibility and ultimately the reliability of what they are saying. We listen, we assess for consistency, plausibility and we compare it with what we do know about that person or thing.

Likewise, for years we have been told by social scientists that the majority of human communication is non-verbal. So when it comes to deciding if someone is lying we tend to - consciously or unconsciously - interpret their facial expressions, body movement and vocal characteristics.

In a trial context this is referred to as witness demeanour. Conventional wisdom relates that liars look and sound shifty. We may think that we are quite good at telling when someone is lying. Certainly lawyers, Judges and psychologists think they are better than average at this. But an analysis of psychological studies of deception detection consistently shows that most people cannot do better than chance in discerning lies under laboratory conditions.

Many experiments have been conducted to gauge the extent to which observation of demeanour helps when assessing veracity. In one such experiment assessing the truth of respondents, half of the group was permitted to see and hear the interviews and thus assess the respondent's demeanour. The other half was restricted to reading a transcript of the interview.

The results were emphatic: behavioural cues popularly thought to be associated with lying - posture, head movements, shifty eyes, gaze aversion, fidgeting, and gesturing - have no correlation with dishonesty or lack of credibility. In fact, the study showed that visual information actually reduces observer accuracy and the ability to detect deceit. This appears to arise because popular liar stereotyping is primarily visual. The cues that do manifest with lying are so subtle that they are imperceptible to the ordinary person without sophisticated measuring equipment. Most people are nervous when they are being accused or interrogated. This increase the chances of "Othello error" - a false interpretation of stress and nervousness as lying (think poor Desdemona) and confidence and openness as truthfulness (think manipulative Iago). 

Othello & Desdemona and Iago

So what's the point? Should we never bother trying to accurately read a person's demeanour? Popular culture had picked up on the detection of micro-expressions which last for one fifteenth of a second (the TV show "Lie to Me" is one such example). However, only one person in 300 is capable of detecting micro-expressions without special training. Where we, as the average face-reading person, does better is at recognising a lite if it occurs in a predominantly truthful context. In a setting where virtually no lies are told, the rate at which the distinction between truth and lies is accurately detected rises to about 60 per cent. Social science also emphasises the importance of intuition and unconscious appraisal of veracity which allows the brain time to integrate a more complete judgement of subtle cues that our conscious mind cannot quite perceive. However, I am suspicious of this advice - "intuition" or talk about "gut instinct", don't forget, are social constructions and often borne from internalised preconceptions and stereotypes.

In sum, there are good reasons for caution at overestimating your ability to detect a lie from just looking at a person, particularly if your job or role requires you to make important decisions about facts. The implication is, pay attention to other cues to deceit and give someone the benefit of the doubt.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In writing a blog about several topics in which I admit to being a complete beginner, I am going to have to rely heavily on the people I am writing for who cumulatively know most of what I am likely to learn already. I would love it if some of you found the time to write a guest post on the subject of happiness or learning. The framework I use for thinking about these things is what I call the '5 + 2 points' which includes proper (1) exercise, (2) breathing, (3) diet, (4) relaxation, (5) positive thinking & meditation, (+1) relationships, (+2) flow. Naturally if you would like to write about something that you think I have missed, I would love to include that too. If you are up to doing something more practical, it would be awesome if you did a 100 hour project and I am happy to do the writing based on our chats if that is how you roll. Email me at trevorjohnblack@gmail.com 

Happily Ever After

'They were the best of...'

Although just five very common words, you are likely able to identify the quote above. This was the argument used by the inventor of the windshield when suing Ford and Chrysler for patent infringement (See the movie 'Flash of Genius'). Robert Kearns invented a blade which blinks every few seconds rather than continuously. The parts used were simple, and the combination required once pointed out was simple too. After a long, life destructive battle, he eventually won a pyrrhic victory.

I think about this when wanting to write about relationships. I spoke yesterday about how advice is really speaking to your younger self. This is probably most obvious in relationships. In each one, you learn something else. The problem is these lessons are very personal and each combination of five words while not unique is unique. We don't talk openly about relationships because there is two way trust with the person you were with. It becomes very easy to read between the lines and it is uncertain what is fair to share because any 'advice' is clearly your story applied to someone elses life. So I tread carefully in this post.

A friend, Richard, asked on Facebook the other day, 'How would you try to change a community (read suburb) when it comes to the success of marriages in that community?'

As someone who has never been married, I have far more questions than answers to this. I am hoping readers of this blog might add some thoughts. In a blog about happiness and learning, not writing about this would be odd since it is such an important part of happiness. Ken Robinson said that 7 of his 8 great grandparents lived within a two mile radius of each other. This was either an extraordinary coincidence and alignment of the stars, or their standards were basically, 'You'll do'. The world has got more complicated. Dan Gilbert makes the point that we used to do what our parents did, live where we were born, and marry someone from the neighbourhood. The world has both shrunk and expanded in that we can go anywhere but in so doing we are also further from other sources of happiness. The kind you get from simplicity.

You can't have everything, and I think we get a good deal. I would rather live today than at any time in the past. Even though we are reestablishing what the expectations are in a relationship, and that makes it harder to coordinate each others life goals, I wouldn't want to go back to a world where it was only the man's career that was relevant and our lives were almost pre-planned. It is a fairly recent phenomenon that marriages were for love. Westerners look at the eastern practice of arranged marriages with perplexed faces, but it is not long ago that marriage was a largely political construct. One interesting source of reading on this topic for me has been Elizabeth Gilbert.

I had mixed reactions to 'Eat Pray Love'. I found it very inspirational and at the same time it left me feeling like there was a problem in its message. I still haven't resolved this and it is likely close to the core of Richard's question. Liz Gilbert willingly and happily enters a marriage that reflected everything she had been looking for. The husband did nothing wrong but she was deeply unhappy. In leaving, the story ends well for both her and the husband who remarries. As suggested by the name of the book, after a year of eating, praying and loving she finds happiness. Part of that happiness is with another man. Conflicted about what marriage is all about, she wrote the follow up book which is a researched history of marriage and studies on marriage.

The reason I am conflicted about 'Eat, Pray, Love' is that I like the idea of a promise that you stick to. The pain she put her first husband through was intense. Should she have worked it out? They could have lived a happy alternate life. Although the story works out, Gilbert strikes me as a happy person. Her story would have worked out if she had taken another path too. The message is essentially that you have to love yourself first before you can love others. Even if that involves hurting someone. They will heal and you will heal. Just do the hurting as kindly as possible. What that means is that we value individual happiness and freedom over the idea of having long term commitments around which to build more stable institutions like marriage. I think that is the way I lean too, but there is a cost.

HT: Terry Alex @takecareofUUU

We don't know what life will throw at us and how relationships will evolve. The question is how much effort gets put into fixing them. If the commitment is fixed, there is always the chance that one or both of the partners stops trying. There is no fear of the person leaving and so they stop looking after themselves and stop looking after the their partner. It scares me looking at lots of relationships where the partners aren't even nice to each other. Paul Ekman claims to be able to quickly tell if a relationship will last by looking for indications of contempt. Once you lose the benefit of the doubt, and start assuming the others actions are malicious rather than being on their side, things fall apart.

The other issue I think about is whether we expect too much from partners. We look for a friend, lover, confidant, cheerleader, parent to our children, etc. etc. Most of our friends don't meet all of our needs, but they are very good at meeting some of them. Making space to invest in several friendships perhaps reduces the stress on what is expected from marriage.

Sorry Rich, I hope that is helpful but I don't know. I suspect more coaching would help. The friends I know with good marriages work at it. They also have difficult times but they make good teams. They make sure they stay fit and healthy. They work on their own happiness and they look for ways to invest in the happiness of their partner. They give their partner the benefit of the doubt and treat them kindly. They also have support from friends. Perhaps one way to look at the success of marriages may be to look at the quality rather than the length. Higher quality may lead to longer marriages, but it may also mean that some 'successful marriages' are ones that end.

Being Wrong

As often happens, I went into the bookstore to ask for a copy of a book I was looking for and they didn't have it (sucks to be a brick and mortar book store). The advantage of this though is that while you will eventually get to the book you were looking for, sometimes another one grabs you... one you weren't looking for.

To set the record straight... the reason my nickname is Swart Donkey, is partly because I am very noisy, and partly because I am very stubborn. Neither those who grew up with me, nor those who know me today will dispute that. Hopefully though, those who know me today know that I both acknowledge and work on my stubbornness.

I have changed my mind about some far too significant things to think I am always right. One of my favourite quotes is

These are men with bold ideas, but highly critical of their own ideas; they try to find whether their ideas are right by trying to find whether they are not perhaps wrong. They work with bold conjectures and severe attempts at refuting their own conjectures.
(Karl Popper)

This is however far easier said than done. Being a rather enthusiastic chap, I sometimes get really passionate about an idea, and can make no claim to being its biggest critic.

So then... perhaps it is no co-incidence that while walking into a bookstore to look for an altogether different book, I should stumble upon one with a simple bright red cover, and bold white writing for the title:

Being Wrong - Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

I will let you know where it takes me.

Orange Juice and Doubt

Richard Feynman was a rather amusing guy, and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965. I am busy reading his book called 'What Do You Care What Other People Think?'.

In it he both underplays his intelligence in areas other than his area of core competence, but also says you should be too reverent for the opinions of others if they don't make sense.

It is a bit of a balancing act. There is absolutely no way we can be competent in all areas, and we need to rely on experts. There just isn't enough time to fully understand everything. We can't trust blindly though.

A further problem is that so many people have very strong views on things outside there area of competence. They may very well be experts in some areas, but you can't assume that they have put as much thought into other areas they may well speak very confidently about.

At the end of the day though, we can't be paralyzed because we don't have the time (or ability) to find out everything for ourselves and we can't trust everything experts say. We have to muddle on. So perhaps (in addition to an inquisitive mind)... the best thing Feynman's life suggests is a bit of a sense of humour.

Give the man some orange juice.