DaveShearon

Dorian Paskowitz is a positive person

Update May 23, 2008: Positive person?  Well, he sure seemed that way from the material I had when I wrote this post.  And his wikipedia entry as it exists today seems to back that up, but, in today's Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern writes:

 

The distributors of "Surfwise" are selling it as a surfing movie with a strong hippie undertow. Doug Pray's documentary does cover a lot of coastal territory. But its core is a case study of narcissism, and what a remarkable case it is -- a dropout doctor, now 85 years old, who enlisted, or imprisoned, his wife and their nine children in his dream of endless summers, primal vitality and perfect waves.

***

As you watch Doc Paskowitz perform for Mr. Pray's camera, it's hard not to judge him harshly. His narcissism seems boundless, even when he cloaks it in self-deprecation. ("I went out into the desert like Jesus of Nazareth or some other screwball," he says of a pre-fatherhood trip he took to Israel and its beaches.) An apostle of uninhibited sex, he rated the women he slept with. He prides himself on having raised disciplined kids, however permissive his parenting may have seemed to others, but then we learn from some of those kids that he was dictatorial, even wrathful, sometimes beating them and setting them against one another, by way of teaching them to be competitive, "like crabs in a bucket."

***

Yet Dorian Paskowitz was more than a heedlessly free spirit who seduced and enslaved those closest to him. He was a principled man with a fanatical dedication to the idea of family, an emotionally damaged physician trying to heal himself while giving the gift of health to his kids.

 

Judging people is a harsh business.  I prefer to see positives, but complexities are part of all of us.  I certainly have mine!  Meanwhile, here's the original post:

He's jewish.

He's 86.

He can't stand well and has titanium in his hip.

And he's a surfer who just donated surfboards to Palestinian surfers after reading of two who had to share one board with him.

Arthur Rashkovan, a 28-year-old surfer from Tel Aviv, said Paskowitz's project was part of a larger effort called "Surfing for Peace," aimed at bringing Middle Eastern surfers closer together. He said eight-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater, who is of Syrian descent, is expected to arrive in Israel in October to take part in the drive.

"We want Palestinians to enjoy the surfing experience. We believe it brings people together," Rashkovan said. "The idea is for people to forget about the violence and follow the journey to peace on the waves."

Paskowitz is venerated by Israeli surfers as the man who brought the sport to the Jewish state five decades ago. Rashkovan called him a "guru" to Israeli surfers.

h/t: Instapundit

Build a Kid Up

“What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss, was what not to do: beat up a kid. It’s easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing is to build him up.”  Sean Tuohy

Sean Tuohy and his whole family are positive people. That quote is taken from this story:

The Ballad of Big Mike

Read it if you like football.

Read it if you're interested in schools and education.

Read it if you want to believe more in people.

Just read it.

Richard Feynman

I've just finished Richard Feynman: A Life in Science by John and Mary Gribbin.  Here are some positive psychology observations.

First, it's clear that Dr. Feynman had a great capacity to love and be loved.  He married his high school sweetheart knowing that she had contracted tuberculosis.  And he seemed to be able to enjoy time spent with her while she was in a facility near him during the time he was working on the Manhattan project at Los Alamos.  In a letter to her written after her death and found among his papers after his, he expressed his deep love for her and how empty her absence made his life.  He went on, after 10 years or so, to marry again and have a family that seems to have been important to him and a source of pleasure, engagement, and meaning.  In summarizing, the authors write:

Richard Feynman was indeed, as well as being a scientific genius, a good man who spread love and affection among his family, friends and acquaintances.  In spite of the dark period in his life after the death of Arline, he was a sunny character who made people feel good, a genuinely fun-loving, kind and generous man, as well as being the greatest physicist of his generation.

In addition to his capacity to love and be loved, he had a great deal of zest.  Speaking of that "dark period", the authors note that he was, by his standards, depressed, but that no one noticed.  His mentor and friend at the time said, "Feynman depressed is just a little more cheerful than any other person when he is exuberant."

He also appears to have had a real appreciation of beauty and excellence, as he became a highly accomplished drummer and skilled artist.

Finally, Richard Feynman, for all the magic of his mind, clearly had a growth view of "smarts."  Being smart was about gaining knowledge and exerting effort persistently toward understanding, things that he took great joy in doing.  But, he had his times when understanding did not just blossom in his mind effortlessly.  For example, he has recounted how difficult he found solid geometry.  For the first two weeks, he just didn't get it.  Then he finally realized that the drawings the teacher placed on the blackboard were intended to be of 3-D figures and it clicked.  But, had he had a "fixed" mindset, this might well have been enough to convince him he had reached the end of his math smarts. 

This growth mindset is also evident in the advice he gave his younger sister, whom he adored.  Feynman was in graduate school and his sister, Joan, was 14.  She was fascinated by astronomy, but had been told by their mother that the female brain wasn't up to doing science.  Feyman gave her a college-level astronomy text and, when she said it was too difficult, he replied:

"You start at the beginning and you read as far as you can, until you get lost.  Then you start at the beginning again, and you keep working through until you can understand the whole book."

This is not the advice of a "fixed" mindset person; he did not see difficulty as a sign of "not smart", but as an indication of a need for a new strategy and greater effort.  Joan went on to become a respected scientist in her own right.  In a further slap at the "entity" view of intelligence, Joan's high school IQ measurement was 124, while Richard's was 123!

Reggie Fils-Aime

Another positive person is Reggie Fils-Aime, President of Nintendo America.  His fame in the gaming console world stems from a speech he made a few years ago when Nintendo was struggling and he was head of marketing and sales:  "My name is Reggie. I'm about kickin' ass, I'm about takin' names, and we're about makin' games."  He didn't write it, according to this article in the Seattle Times.  But he gave it and it was a hit with Nintendo fans.  Bold?  Brash?  Yep.  And completely in synch with his steadfast solid optimism and positivity.  His longtime girlfriend describes him like this:

Fils-Aime is unfailingly optimistic, friends say. Sanner said she has never once heard him complain — about anything.

"He is not given to any sort of negative thinking," she said. "He doesn't worry, he doesn't waffle, he doesn't waver, he doesn't agonize."

Fils-Aime says he gets that trait from his mother, who always saw the bright side even though her own life took dramatic turns.

Bishop Desmond Tutu - a Positive Person

In my Lawyering and the Good Life presentations, I urge participants to consider that a concerted effort to develop positive characteristics such as hope, optimism, and happiness makes sense because it helps us undertake and achieve signicant and challenging goals.  Here's an example.  Today's Wall Street Journal has an article  on Bishop Desmond Tutu that begins:

Among his many essential arts -- those of persuasion, rhetoric, theology and politics -- there is one that stands out over all others when I meet Desmond Tutu in the flesh at a hotel in midtown Manhattan: the art of laughter.

In the course of an hour's conversation with Archbishop Tutu, I hear a fuller range of cackles, chuckles and giggles than I have ever encountered in one who was not a child, or drunk, or a professional comedian. It is an instinctive laughter, not cultivated; but even so, one senses that "the Arch" grasped early in life its power to disarm an interlocutor.

The rest of the article supports the point.  Enjoy it all if you are a subscriber.