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Welcome!

Disclaimer: I work at Amazon but this writing does not represent Amazon in any way. Opinions written here are strictly my own.

Who is Robert Schlaff?

I’m a devoted husband and father to an awesome family. For work, I’m the Banking Business Development Manager for Amazon Web Services. For more information about what I do at work, please visit my LinkedIn profile.

About This Site

I collect stories. There are so many amazing things happening every day. I need to spend some time writing them down before they slip away. Madeleine L’Engle said that every writer needs to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. But some of this stuff is too good to keep to myself. So I’m sharing it with you.

When I’m writing, I picture having a conversation with some of the world’s smartest and most interesting people — you, my readers. I picture us all sitting around a table telling stories and having fun. I’d like to think we’re a digital version of the Algonquin Round Table. Throughout the 1920s, some friends would meet daily for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. They included the founding editor of the New Yorker Harold Ross, the playwright George S. Kaufmann and the writer Dorothy Parker. This group, called The Algonquin Round Table,  would meet to tell stories and share quips in a bustling city that was finding its place on the world stage. They were the original raconteurs of New York, getting together to share stories that would enlighten and entertain. In an age when we no longer have two-martini lunches, I wanted to humbly bring that sensibility online.

Highlights

Life Lessons

Product

Technical

Human Behavior

Math and Logic

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On Amazon – A Peculiar Company

Disclaimer: I work at Amazon but this writing does not represent Amazon in any way. Opinions written here are strictly my own.

Amazon has a very strong culture. At other places I’ve worked, culture is an aspiration at the senior level but took a back seat to more pressing concerns like making as much money as possible. Amazon’s culture is embedded in its 14 Leadership Principles that are a common language and framework that form the basis of everything the company does, from interviews to everyday decisions. You can get a good feeling of the Amazon culture by watching videos of Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. A few good ones are from the Economic Club of Washington, an interview by his brother Mark,  the Axel Springer Award, and a 60 Minutes Story about Amazon from 1999.

Continue reading “On Amazon – A Peculiar Company”

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In Praise of Humility — The Forgotten Story of Edward S. Harkness

The Residential Colleges were created 85 years ago. Though they have the names of many famous Yalies, the donor of these colleges is nowhere to be seen. Why?

What is a Yalie? When I think of the archetypical Yalie, I think of two things. First, a Yalie is someone who will do great things and change the world. Second, a Yalie has great human qualities of humility, philanthropy and caring for others.  While Yalies are always reminded of our great alumni and donors plastered across campus we rarely see the humbler and more human side. That’s why it’s important to remember Edward S. Harkness. Continue reading “In Praise of Humility — The Forgotten Story of Edward S. Harkness”

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How to be Happy — Yale’s Most Popular Class

This year Professor Laurie Santos created Yale’s most popular class of all time. The class is titled Psychology and the Good Life but it’s really a course on how to be happy both in the short and long term. I was excited to hear that Yale was offering the course but even more excited to see that the class is available online. While there’s little I hadn’t heard before, it did a great job of focusing me on what’s important and helped me get into the practice of being happier.

Continue reading “How to be Happy — Yale’s Most Popular Class”

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The Mother-in-Law’s Guide to Software Testing

This is part of my Mother-in-Law’s Guide to Technology. My Mother-in-Law is a very smart woman even if she isn’t a “computer person.” The goal of this series is to take some big and treacherous sounding ideas and bring them down to earth.

Dearest Mother-in-Law,

Remember when you had kids and you told them to do stuff. And remember how they used to do what you told them but that wasn’t always what you intended them to do? Well, that’s the way computer programs work.

Just like kids, computer programs will do what you tell them, but beyond that, all bets are off. They don’t do anything that directly contradicts what you said but that doesn’t mean they’ll do what you want them to do. Continue reading “The Mother-in-Law’s Guide to Software Testing”

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The Mother-in-Law’s Guide to Cloud Computing

This is part of my “Mother-in-Law’s Guide to Technology.” My Mother-in-Law is a very smart woman even if she isn’t a “computer person.” The goal of this post is to take a very big and treacherous sounding idea and bring it down to earth. I tried this before in a post which I’ve now renamed The Mother-In-Law’s Guide to Chaos Engineering.

Dearest Mother-in-Law,

You know when we visit a Target or a Wal-Mart in the suburbs and they have 30 checkout lanes and only 3 are open at any time? I always wondered why that happens. It even sparked someone to write a funny blog post about the phenomenon: Target Store Opens More than Three Checkout Lanes; Shoppers Confused. Continue reading “The Mother-in-Law’s Guide to Cloud Computing”

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What a Wonderful Word

From the book Lost in Translation by Ella Frances Sanders

I remember the first time it happened to me. It was the first year of business school and we were working on an economics problem set. My friend Yugin had just arrived from Korea and she was correcting an answer for her economics homework.

She asked me “What’s the English word for after you erase something?”

I thought this was a philosophical question like, “What’s left of an image after you remove it?” Something like the way Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing by William de Kooning to push the boundaries of art.

So I answered, “When you erase something there’s nothing left. You’ve erased it.”

“No, that’s not what I’m asking. Those little pink things that come off the eraser. What do you call that?”

“Hmmm … eraser shavings maybe. We don’t have a word for that in English.”

“Huh,” she said, “that’s odd. We have a word for that in Korean.”

It kind of blew my mind. I’d known this before but for some reason, it never sunk in. When things have a name it makes them more real. It gives them an identity. Dale Carnegie said that “A person’s name is the sweetest sound.” Mastercard shows the excitement and validation that trans people have when they have their real names (vs. their birth names) on their credit cards.

That’s why I love the young people’s book What a Wonderful Word. This short collection of 24 untranslatable words from around the world is beautifully illustrated and highlights the wonderful and surprising differences in cultures around the world.

I don’t even think of words that are unique to English like “whimsey” and “gobbledygook.” I’m also used to hearing some common words from the Jewish Dialect of Yiddish like “shlimazl,” a person who suffers from relentless bad luck.

I thought that most untranslatable words would describe things that I hadn’t experienced and couldn’t use, like:

  • Poronkusema (Finnish, pronounced porr-ON-ku-se-ma). The distance a reindeer can walk before needing to use the toilet. Normally less than 5 miles.
  • Murr-Ma (Wagiman, an indigenous Australian language, pronounced mer-mah). To walk through the water, searching for something with only your feet.

Some languages have certain words based on their cultures or environments that are relevant more broadly. The Icelandic may be indoors more often than New Yorkers due to the brutal cold, but there are many Gluggavedur days in New York in the dead of winter that look inviting from the inside but are brutally cold.

  • Abbiocco (Italian, pronounced ah-bee-OH-ko). Drowsiness from eating a big meal.
  • Gluggavedur (Icelandic, pronounced GLU-ka-ve-duh). Weather that looks beautiful while you’re inside, but is much too cold when you step outside.

Surprisingly, there are a lot of words in other languages that provide names for things I experience but couldn’t name before. Naming them provides a clarity and instantiation that makes them more real.

  • Talaka (Belarusian, pronounced ta-la-ka). The act of helping someone in their house or field without expecting payment other than a good meal shared at the end of the day.
  • Nakama (Japanese, pronounced na-ka-MA). Friends who are like family.
  • Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese, pronounced ca-FOO-neh). The act of running your fingers through someone’s hair
  • Mencolek (Indonesian, pronounced men-CHO-leck). The act of tapping someone lightly on the opposite shoulder from behind to fool them.
  • Pelinti (Buli, a Ghanian language, pronounced peh-lin-tee). To move food that is too hot around your mouth as you wait for it to cool down.
  • Pochemuchka (Russian, pronounced potch-MOOCH-ka). A child who asks “why?” all the time; a person who asks too many questions.

This commonality of experience across the world reminds me of a talk I’d heard by a Rabbi who was also a medieval historian. He talked about how most religions have a holiday at the end of December. Jews have Hanukah, Christians have Christmas, etc. He told us that this wasn’t a coincidence. All of these religions are praying to their god to bring back the sun as it faded into the winter solstice. All of these groups were frightened that the sun wouldn’t come back.

I was surprised that a Rabbi would be talking like this. “Doesn’t it make you feel like our religion is less special if we’re just doing the same thing as everyone else?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “quite the opposite. It makes me feel part of a larger global community where we all have the same hopes and fears.”

Note: I found this book from my favorite gift guide.

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How Much is That Really Worth? The Mother-in-Law’s Guide to Valuation

Dearest Mother-in-Law,
Last year, when you and I went to the One World Observatory, we saw that famous tourist location—the penny crushing machine. We watched a tourist put her penny in the machine and then added in a dollar. The machine then crushed the penny into a medallion that she could take home as a souvenir. Your quite reasonable reaction was, “Why would you pay a dollar to have your own Penny crushed?”
The Penny I Crushed at 1 World Trade
The way you were looking at it was:
  1. Initial valuation: $1.01.
  2. You start with a penny and a dollar.
  3. Then you put a dollar in a machine that crushes the penny.
  4. You get back the crushed penny.
  5. Final valuation: $0.01.
  6. Result: You feel like you’ve wasted a dollar.

But I think the crushed penny is a pretty good value. To understand why, let’s understand the job that the crushed penny is doing. When most people think about products, they think about the product itself, i.e., I’ve taken a penny and gotten a crushed penny. But people don’t buy most products just to own them, they hire products to perform a job. The famous Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt used to tell his students, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School, and Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit, introduce the concept in their article Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure. I’ve paraphrased some key parts below.

A hypothetical fast-food restaurant is looking to improve sales of its milkshakes. Researchers observed that in the afternoon parents often bought milkshakes, in addition to complete meals, for their children. What job were the parents trying to do? They were exhausted from repeatedly having to say “no” to their kids. They hired milkshakes as an innocuous way to placate their children and feel like loving parents. This was expected and a well known job that milkshakes perform.

However, one researcher was surprised to find that 40% of all milkshakes were purchased in the early morning by customers driving alone in their cars. He found that most bought it to do the job of making their drive to work more interesting and keep them satiated until noon. 

So the milkshake is doing two completely different jobs. With children, the milkshake is a competitor to a toy or candy. However, as an early morning snack, customers may buy a bagel, banana, or donut instead. The key point here is that the milkshake can be hired to do completely different jobs, meaning that it has a very different value depending on the context.

Getting back to my crushed penny. I want it to do the job of a souvenir, providing a physical memento of the trip that the kids can buy and keep. The alternatives are a t-shirt, a stuffed animal, or a postcard. It would be hard to find a souvenir for my boys for cheaper than that.

So I’ve talked to my kids and we agree that the crushed penny is a good souvenir. But how can we make it more valuable than another typical item they might get at the souvenir shop. That’s where the elongated coin album comes in.

The Penny Crusher Album
At the One World Observatory, you asked me why anyone would buy a case for these crushed pennies. “It’s even more useless than the crushed penny!” you insisted. But the album has a wonderful purpose. It lets my boys keep their crushed pennies in a safe place and makes sure they don’t lose them. It turns a crushed penny into a treasured collectible and makes the kids into official crushed penny collectors. Then, when they are deciding between whether they want the crushed penny or an expensive souvenir, we can have a discussion on what we’re likely to keep around longer and value more. The crushed penny and album should do well in that fight.
The Boys Penny Collection (So Far)
I agree with you that crushing a penny for $1 is not a worthwhile exercise. But creating a token souvenir at every tourist attraction we attend for $1 in lieu of something we’d just lose is a great deal! Buying an album is a drop in the bucket and makes each penny that much more valuable to the kids.
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Thank You for Being a Friend

If you threw a party and invited everyone you knew, you would see the biggest gift would be from me and the card attached would say, “Thank you for being a friend.”
— Theme Song from The Golden Girls

In Judaism, the word minyan refers to a group of 10 adults that come together to pray.  For certain prayers, most importantly prayers of mourning, a minyan must be present. It’s a struggle to find 10 Jewish men and women on a Sunday morning at our shul. On one cold day, I volunteered and was the 8th adult there. Not convinced we’d get to 10, we started the service. I was wondering why we had this arbitrary number of 10. Why are we dragging some people out of bed who don’t want to be there? Just then, surprisingly, the 10th person showed up and in a palpable way, and we were transformed. We went from praying as individuals to praying as a community. I felt like we were the lions forming Voltron.

It made me think about friendship. Friendship is about being there for one another. Anyone can celebrate with you when it’s convenient. A true friend is always standing by you even when especially when things are tough.

I used to think that there must be some sort of rhyme or reason to friendships. Or maybe that there was some grand hierarchy of friendships. I’m not sure why, but I used to think that celebrities must have some sort of better or more important relationships than other people. Like when Kevin Smith talked about when Ben Affleck had Thanksgiving dinner with Stephen Speilberg and George Lucas when he was dating Gwyneth Paltrow [NSFW language].

But then I learned that life doesn’t really work that way. There’s no grand plan for friendship. When I was in college things used to be easier. I could just sit and hang out with friends for hours without an agenda. At my college reunion, I remember having an hour of unscheduled and agenda-less time to wander around with one of my good friends. It was spectacular. I don’t get opportunities like this anymore. My friends from college moved far away and everyone started to get very busy with work and kids. My friends became the people who sat in the cubicles next to me.

One day I ran into an old friend at my college reunion. She said, “You know, we should catch up more often. Even though you’re in New York and I’m in Michigan, we can have a virtual lunch date. Instead of going to lunch with the people who sit next to us we can have a virtual lunch date.”

“That’s a great idea,” I said. When I tell other people about this, they tell me how smart she is. I say, “That makes sense, she’s a Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan.”

My friends who sit next to me at work are friends of convenience. They are great people and great friends. I was very lucky to have some phenomenal people sitting next to me. But my really good friends are friends of inconvenience. Let me give you an example. One day I was walking to the subway when I saw my friend was walking back home in the opposite direction. I turned around and started walking with her.

“You’re going the wrong way!” she said.

“That’s OK,” I said, “I have a few minutes and I never get to see you.”

It wasn’t that she was helping me get somewhere. Walking with her was actually moving me further away from the subway, but it was worth it.

All of my good friends are like that these days. Everyone is so busy. I don’t really run into people much anymore. I feel like everything needs to be scheduled. My friends are so busy with their important jobs and running around with their kids that I feel bad just calling to chat.

A few years ago, I was excited because my good friend and I were both looking for jobs. So we started having a weekly call to be “job search buddies.” When he found a job much more quickly than I did, I got a little upset.

“I’m going to miss our weekly catch-ups,” I said.

“You know,” he said, “we can just catch up every week anyway. Let’s put that on the calendar instead.”

I’m humbled that my friends want to carve time out of their day to spend with me. They are wonderfully accomplished, smart, sweet, and thoughtful. I learn so much from them and deeply enjoy spending time with them. I realize that they must feel the same way about me, though it’s hard for me to fathom that.

At the end of the day, friendship is just being there for each other. I was at a college reunion with one of my good friends. We were sitting at a table and someone asked her, “How do you guys know each other?”

My friend had the perfect answer. She said, “I don’t really know. We met at some event, and now we have regular lunches with each other. I probably see Rob more frequently than I see almost anyone else. At this point, we’re just really good friends.”

Note: Choosing between friendship based theme songs for the title was difficult: Thank You for Being a Friend (Golden Girls), You Can Count on Me (My Two Dads), I’ll Be There For You (Friends), and You’ve Got a Friend in Me (Toy Story) were all strong contenders.

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Mother-in-Law’s Guide to Open Banking

Dearest Mother-in-Law,

First of all, Open Banking is not about keeping banks open later in the day or having more banks open on Sundays. Open Banking is about 2 things:

  1. Open Banking Regulation: Many countries are regulating how banking data can be used. Open Banking refers to customer ownership of their own banking data. This article will focus on Open Banking regulation.
  2. Open Banking Collaboration: Even when this regulation doesn’t exist, banks see the benefit of collaboration and the usage of APIs (which is just a technical word for being able to use stuff from other banks). This version of Open Banking is broader and I’ll try to cover it in another post at some point.

Continue reading “Mother-in-Law’s Guide to Open Banking”

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Creating Great Social Experiences

Creating products is about building great experiences for customers. In the past, companies would create products to tell a story to customers. But my old boss, Raja Rajamannar, CMO of Mastercard, says, Storytelling is Dead. Jeff Bezos says that at Amazon, “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” However you cut it, customers are now engaged participants rather than passive recipients. It’s the job of companies to engage with customers rather than just treat them as an audience. Continue reading “Creating Great Social Experiences”

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Carpe Diem! How to Live Like a King

At the end of last year, Bubbie, my last living grandparent, was fading away. She couldn’t see, could barely walk, and her kidneys were failing. It was becoming clear that we needed to savor each moment with her. So we created some great memories — like the last time we had a steak dinner with her and needed to push her on her walker around the corner to the restaurant. Or the last time she came to our house and Ari asked if he could snuggle her because he really likes snuggling people. We spent those last months finding special moments with Bubbie. And it was exciting because Bubbie was always up for some good fun.

I needed to focus on the quality of the time with Bubbie, not the quantity. You’d think that you could amass enough of something to make you happy, but it rarely does. Take ice cream for example. Bubbie loved ice cream. When I go to a great ice cream shop like the Sugar Factory I want to get the biggest and best thing they have. At Sugar Factory this would be an Insane Milkshake. On the menu, these milkshakes look awesome! They are the biggest most wonderful things on the planet. And I think that if I drink the whole thing, I will be happy forever. And then it comes. And the first sip is incredible. There’s even candy on top and chocolate covering on the outside of the mug. But as I eat it, it tastes less good and by the end, it becomes an unhappy challenge to even finish it. Eventually, through multiple visits, I learned that savoring a little bit of ice cream is far better than trying to eat all the ice cream in the world.

When I look at experiences I feel the same way. I think about all the places I haven’t been and adventures I haven’t tried. I want to pack them all into my bag of experiences and it just becomes overwhelming. But then I get excited at the wealth of possible adventures that I can explore every day. I just need to pay more attention. In my office building, there’s a skylight looking up at the Empire State Building that I didn’t even notice until my son pointed it out. I was always rushing by it to get lunch. There’s a great book on how dense the world is and how much we don’t see called On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation by Alexandra Horowitz. In the book, Dr. Horowitz takes us down the same street with 11 different experts and shows us how much we’re missing as we walk down the street.

I even ignore the truly glorious things that are right in front of me. I remember when Ari was in preschool next to Central Park. How lucky was I! I got to walk to work by Central Park after dropping him off! One day I realized that I’d walked by Central Park thinking about work and what I had to do. All of a sudden I’d be at the subway, having completely checked out from the experience.  It struck me that this wasn’t going to last forever, Ari was going to graduate, and I wouldn’t be able to do this anymore. I thought about how I could make the most of the time I had left. Each day, I would take a full minute when I got to the park (I timed it) to just appreciate how lucky I was. A few times, I even took pictures of how pretty the landscape was because I knew that every day it would look slightly different. Finally, I played a game called, “Last Day” where I walked through the park like it was the last day of school. It’s an oddly fun game and it’s amazing how you can have that “Last Day” experience many times.

Central Park in the Spring
Central Park in the Winter

I’d forgotten about this Central Park experience for quite a while. Then I found myself in Japan at a work conference. I had some time to explore Tokyo one afternoon and ended up at the Imperial Palace. I ran around the place for a while seeing some amazing things like the burned down area where the concubines used to live. And the giant Tenshu tower that burned down in 1657 and was not rebuilt because one of the elders felt that the Shogunate had done such a good job protecting the peace that a proper tower was not necessary so it was never rebuilt.

As I walked through the East Gardens of the Imperial Palace, things seemed beautiful yet familiar. I was kind of annoyed at first thinking “WTF. I’ve come halfway around the world to see this Imperial Garden and it’s not any better than the park down the street.” Then I realized that I can’t compare them. Even though the Imperial Garden isn’t that different from Central Park, it doesn’t make it any less wonderful. I need to really step in and appreciate it slowly and take a minute and really absorb the place rather than compare it to someplace else.

The way to really appreciate the Imperial garden is the same way to appreciate Central Park. I need to soak in the little things as much as the big ones — reveling in and appreciating the moment.

It’s a pretty amazing experience. The Emperor of Japan opened his private garden to the public so that laypeople like you and me can see what it’s like to be an emperor. And it hit me: WE ARE LITERALLY LIVING LIKE KINGS.

Approaching the Emperor’s Iris Garden
In the Emperor’s Iris Garden

This was a profound experience. I was literally an Emperor for an hour and it didn’t make me happy. But when I took a step back to savor the moment, that filled me with joy. My friend, the Reverend Steve Singleton, likes to call out the difference between happiness and joy. Happiness (from the root “hap” meaning lucky) is what happens to you vs. joy is something that comes from you.

I started this piece by contemplating how important it is to savor every moment when someone is dying. But I know that every moment dies once it’s over. I remember when Blake was at his second birthday party. He turned to me and said, “Are all of these presents for me?” I thought this was wonderful, I’d raised the perfect humble selfless child who would always be like that. But of course I hadn’t. He changed into a normal kid on his next birthday screaming, “I want more presents!” I learned that when the kids do something cute and I say, “I’ll take a picture of it next week,” they’ve already grown out of it by the time I get around to snapping a photo.

The key to living like a king is to savor life, sucking all of the marrow you can out of each experience. Anna Quindlen, in her book A Short Guide to a Happy Life, has a great quote from Gwendolyn Brooks that sums it up well:

EXHAUST THE LITTLE MOMENT.
SOON IT DIES.

AND BE IT GASH OR GOLD
IT WILL NOT COME

AGAIN IN THIS IDENTICAL
DISGUISE.

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Focusing on the Most Important Thing

Focusing on the right thing is key to being successful in work and life.  If you focus on one thing, you can accomplish anything. But, as a mentor once told me, “If you have 12 apples, don’t take one bite of each.”

But figuring out what to prioritize can be tricky. At my college reunion, my friend Lutz and I were spending the day with our families. We’d jam-packed the day with great activities. As we were walking down the street, I saw a sign for Ashley’s Homemade Ice Cream.

I said, “Lutz, I’d really like to buy my family some ice cream.”

Being the logical German, he said, “Yes. That would be nice but there’s no time left in the day. We need to go hear the President of the University speak.”

“Lutz,” I said, “you have to prioritize. You can always watch the video of the President’s speech or read a transcript. But how often are you able to spend time with your family on a beautiful spring day, sitting on the college lawn eating ice cream?”

He said, “You’re right. Let’s get the ice cream.”

And it was the best decision we’d made that weekend.

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You Think You’re Better Than Me?! An Open Letter to the Grammar Police

I was at my shul last week and got into an interesting argument with my friend Bill Schwartz. I said, “Bill, the reason you feel this way is that you’re older than me.”

“Than I,” he corrected me.

“No. I really think it’s ‘than me.’ It’s clearly the object of the sentence.”

“Let’s ask my wife Janet. She used to be an English teacher.”

“It’s ‘than I,'” said Janet.

“OK, I said. I’ll look it up and get back to you.”

“Great,” said Bill. “I love receiving email.”

So I looked it up and I found some interesting pieces. My favorite is this bit from Merriam-Webster:

Some people think they’re better than you because they say “better than I” instead of “better than me.”

They’re not, of course. They’re just among the select group of grammar enthusiasts who think that than can only be a conjunction. You, on the hand, recognize that it can also be a preposition.

That’s right: whether you say “better than me,” “taller than I,” or “more annoying than they” has to do with grammatical categories that we typically only consider when a teacher asks us to.

But the bigger issue is believing that there’s a “right grammar.” John McWhorter is a Professor at Columbia University who writes about how grammar is more a fashion than anything else. McWhorter writes:

An especially enlightening read is William Cobbett’s book-length lecture to his son called “A Grammar of the English Language.” Cobbett’s sense of what good English was in 1818 seems, in 2012, so bizarre we can scarcely imagine someone speaking in such a way and being taken seriously.

To Cobbett, the past tense forms awoke, blew,  built, burst, clung, dealt, dug, drew, froze, grew, hung, meant, spat, stung, swept, swam, threw and wove were all mistakes. The well-spoken person, Cobbett instructed, swimmed yesterday and builded a house last year. In Google’s handy Ngram viewer, using data from millions of books over several centuries, one can see that builded only started falling out of disuse around 1920. Not for any reason; no one discovered that builded was somehow elementally deficient. Fashion changed.

So why was Bill Schwartz so insistent on “better than I?” Let’s use Google Ngram to see the historical trends of these two phrases. You can click on the graphic to interact with it.

As you can see, when Bill was in school, “better than I” was the fashion. But don’t lose hope, “better than me” is coming on strong!

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My Blog as a Jewish Folk Tale

As I think about the sensibility that I have in this blog and the stories I tell, there’s a certain Jewishness to it. After reading the book A Treasury of Jewish Folklore, I can see it clearly. There’s an ironic wit of the underdog in Jewish storytelling that’s been passed down for generations. If you’re unfamiliar with the Jewish storyteller, take a look at Eddie Murphy playing “Old Jewish Man” from the end of the Movie Coming to America.

Jewish folk tales to a great job of explaining how I think about my blog. For example, my goal in this blog is to use stories from my life to make interesting points. But there’s a much better explanation through the following folk tale.

The Preacher of Dubno, Jacob Krantz, was once asked why parables have such persuasive power over people. The Preacher replied, “I will explain this by means of a parable.”

“It happened once that Truth walked about the streets as naked as his mother bore him. Naturally, people were scandalized and wouldn’t let him into their houses. Whoever saw him got frightened and ran away.

“And so as Truth wandered through the streets brooding over his troubles he met Parable. Parable was gaily decked out in fine clothes and was a sight to see. He asked, ‘Tell me, what is the meaning of all this? Why do you walk about naked and looking so woebegone?’

“Truth shook his head sadly and replied, ‘Everything is going downhill with me, brother. I’ve gotten so old and decrepit that everybody avoids me.’

“‘What you’re saying makes no sense,’ said Parable. “People are not giving you a wide berth because you are old. Take me, for instance, I am no younger than you. Nonetheless, the older I get the more attractive people find me. Just let me confide a secret to you about people. They don’t like things plain and bare but dressed up prettily and a little artificial. I’ll tell you what. I will lend you some fine clothes like mine and you’ll soon see how people will take to you.’

“Truth followed this advice and decked himself out in Parable’s gay clothes. And lo and behold! People no longer shunned him but welcomed him heartily. Since that time Truth and Parable are to be seen as inseparable companions, esteemed and loved by all.”

I also like to take examples and then write blog posts around them. The theory surrounding the example is subservient to the example itself. That’s an annoyingly complicated way of saying something better described in the following folk tale.

Once Rabbi Elijah, the Gaon of Vilna, said to his friend, the Preacher of Dubno, “Tell me, Jacob, how in the world do you happen to find the right parable to every subject?”

The Preacher of Dubno answered, “I will explain to you my parabolic method by means of a parable. Once there was a nobleman who entered his son in a military academy to learn the art of musketry. After five years the son learned all there was to be learned about shooting and, in proof of his excellence, was awarded a diploma and a gold medal.

“Upon his way home after graduation he halted at a village to rest his horses. In the courtyard he noticed on the wall of a stable a number of chalk circles and right in the center of each was a bullet hole.

“The young nobleman regarded the circles with astonishment. Who in the world could have been the wonderful marksman whose aim was so unerringly true? In what military academy could he have studied and what kind of medals had he received for his marksmanship!

“After considerable inquiry he found the sharpshooter. To his amazement,  it was a small Jewish boy, barefoot and in tatters.

“‘Who taught you to shoot so well?’ the young nobleman asked him.

“The boy explained, ‘First I shoot at the wall. Then I take a piece of chalk and draw circles around the holes.’

Though I hadn’t thought of it, I’ve been using some of the wisdom of the ages to craft this blog. I guess I wasn’t just messing around and having fun.

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Lessons from My Grandparents

I’m a very lucky boy. I had all four of my grandparents until I was 25. And I had one until this year when I was 41.  Now that they’ve all passed away and I’ve become a grand-orphan, I wanted to honor their memory by reflecting on the lessons they’ve taught me.  To paraphrase the great physicist Richard Feynman, “By the time they died, a lot of what is good about them has rubbed off on other people. So although they are dead, they won’t be completely gone.”

My Bubbie died in January. A couple of months before she died, she told me, “I’m a fighter.” At the time I didn’t want to tell her that the fight wasn’t going well. That an 87-year-old with heart and kidney failure was not winning the battle to live forever. She could hold on a little longer but eventually, as with everyone, death will win. Looking back, I realize she was fighting for something else. She wasn’t fighting for everlasting life, she was fighting to live a good life. It would have been easy for her to just go with the flow and coast off into the sunset—being that woman who just plays bingo and watches Jeopardy until she dies. But to really try to lead a good life—that takes effort.

David Foster Wallace gave a commencement address called This is Water (or more fully This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life) where he tells the following story:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?”

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

To me, this story is about fighting against the current of the water to live a good life. All of my grandparents showed me where the water is, how to separate myself from it, and how to focus on what’s important.

Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned from my mother’s parents, Nana and Papa (Florence and Barney Liebman), and my father’s parents, Bubbie and Zaid (Connie and Norman Schlaff).

Continue reading “Lessons from My Grandparents”