Graduation advice that's timeless

I'm not sure how many college graduates actually tune in to the message of their graduation speakers.

Milton Freedman, the Nobel prize winning economist, was the keynote speaker when I graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1975. I have positively, absolutely no memory what he said. If the graduates today are anything like those of us from 33 years ago their minds are focused on getting a job after graduation, packing the car for the trip home, and the party after the ceremony.

But I came across two graduation speeches this month that impressed me -- one during my daughter's ceremony at Quinnipiac College where she received her doctorate in physical therapy and one at Boston College where my son will graduate in May 2009.

Given by two different types of individuals, the speeches had different but important themes: the use of knowledge and how learning doesn't stop at the completion of an academic education.

Carlton Highsmith is a businessman in Hamden, Conn., home to Quinnipiac, and his focus was on the duty graduates have to themselves and their communities.

He quoted Winston Churchill: "We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give."

He went on: "Could it be that you have a greater purpose in life? You're smart and perceptive enough to be able to look around you and realize that there are people the world over -- as well as right in your own hometowns and neighborhoods -- who are less fortunate than you. There is no shortage of pain and suffering in the world. And as simple as it may sound, each and every one of you can do something that will make a difference in the lives of those less fortunate than you."

He noted the "isms" that his generation -- the Boomer generation -- sought to overcome: me-ism, racism, sexism, and classism.

"Please recognize that whatever you choose as a profession in life, there should be room in your heart as well as on your calendar to do something significant to help someone else," he said.

With my son David graduating from Boston College next May, I paid some attention to this year's commencement as a barometer of the quality of the speakers for next year. This year it was historian and author David McCullough, who entitled his address "The Love of Learning."

His main point was that the Information Age puts an inordinate amount of information at our fingertips. But our access to information doesn’t make us educated; our ability to recall that the most ancient living tree in America is a bristlecone pine in California that is 4,700 years ago (a fact cited by McCullough) isn't enough if it has no content.

"Information is useful. Information is often highly interesting," he said. "Information has value, sometimes great value. The right bit of information at the opportune moment can be worth a fortune. Information can save time and effort. Information can save your life. The value of information, facts, figures, and the like, depends on what we make of it -- on judgment."

You can have all the facts in the world, he said, and miss the truth.

"It can be like the old piano teacher's lament to her student, 'I hear all the notes, but I hear no music,' " he sad.

He encouraged the graduates -- and by way of extension anyone else who listened -- to embark on a lifelong quest of learning.

"Read," McCullough implored a society that, unfortunately, is reading less and less all the time. Read the trashy thriller, he said, but also read or re-read the classics.

I'll take him up on that. The last classic I read was "Huckleberry Finn" a couple of years ago. McCullough suggested Cervantes and "Don Quixote."

Afterall, I know the musical "Man of La Mancha" by heart. I may as well get the literary context from "Don Quixote" while I'm at it.

A yard of work

Finally, I had a weekend to myself to do some yard work.

Ick.

I'm not a big fan of tending to my yard; there's just too much of it to tend. And when it needs tending it is a chore in the true sense of the word. I'd rather be doing anything but doing the lawn, but there it is, in need of tending.

Others find happiness in yard work. I don't find much joy or self-satisfaction in it. I'm not interested in grass that looks like the outfield at Fenway Park or the fairways of Augusta National golf course.

There was a time when I put a lot of effort into lawns, back in the days when I lived in the suburbs north of Boston. I felt compelled to keep up with Dick across the street and Frank next door. They had exquisite lawns, so in order to maintain equal footing in our nice little subdivision I worked at exquisiteness -- I mowed, trimmed, raked, fertilized, de-thatched and aerated. I watered and weeded and worked the soil.

But that was a long time ago, a different life ago. I had a lawn for a long time, then I didn't have a lawn for a long time, having moved into an apartment that had no lawn for me to care for. It was wonderful. I didn't have to block out time during the weekend to tend a yard; I could explore more cerebral and spiritual pursuits, like putting off that novel I'd really like to write or learning Mark Knopfler's complete discography on my guitar.

Then I moved to a house with a lawn again. Before we were married and my not-yet-wife Jane was looking for a house to buy, one of the things I asked was that she not buy a house with a big lawn. And to show how much she loved me, she bought a house with a big lawn. Fortunately, she bought a house that came with a riding lawn mower. For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, 'til death by lawn do us part.

Fortunately, we live in a more rural area where I can't see my neighbors and my neighbors can't see me and, most importantly, my neighbors can't see my lawn. No more Dicks or Franks to measure up against.

So I mow ... but that's it.

I don't rake anymore, for instance. I don't care enough about the lawn to rake leaves during the fall, very unlike the suburbs where I felt the need to maintain the perfectly green carpet look until the first snowfall. I live in an area with lots of deciduous and pine trees. And there are more leaves and pine needles than I'm mentally or physically equipped to handle. This winter was particularly windy, so parts of the yard were littered with tree limbs and sticks.

I wanted to just leave them where they fell. To give the lawn that back-to-nature look. To liberate the lawn from domestication. (Everyone can join in a chorus of "Born Free, as free as the wind blows ...")

But there's the small matter of a wedding in August, and there will be lots of relatives around, so the back-to-nature look wasn't going to fly and the winter detritus needed picking up. It wasn't too bad -- I had Jane's help and there was a means to an end: the sticks we collected will make great kindling for the woodstove next winter, given that we even use the woodstove next winter.

But this lawn doesn't get fertilized or de-thatched or watered or weeded. If I can't do it from the comfort of my butt on the rider mower it won't get done.

My mowing is done with efficiency, from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible, without much finesse, as was evident the first time I mowed right over Jane's plantings of irises in the front yard. Sorry, I said, it looked like tall grass and weeds.

Now I have the time to kick back weekends and enjoy the more cerebral and spiritual pursuits that spring and summer weekends were meant for. No, not writing or playing guitar, more like admiring the outfield grass at Fenway Park or the lush green freeways of Augusta National on TV.

The color of sage

I'm seeing more and more television ads for hair coloring products for middle aged men whose salt and pepper hair is heavy on the salt.

These ads, interestingly enough, don't seek to completely eliminate gray from the salt and pepper palette. The new products such as Just for Men's Touch of Gray allow you to keep in as little or as much gray as you want for both the hair on your head and the hair on your face.

I guess we've come a long way baby from the hair color products that did as well shining shoes as they did hiding or masking gray hair.

In addition to the over-the-counter products more and more hair salons are being asked by men to reduce the salt and increase the pepper. Redken, the hair products people, have something called Color Camo, and a recent New York Times article noted that the number of Color Camo treatments was almost one million last year, up from about 860,000 the previous year.

The attitude out there is that too much gray is the look of death to men who want to retain the look of vitality, which means they still want to look like they've got some usefulness left in them for this society of ours that reveres youth.

That snow on your head is about as appealing as snow in April -- it was kind of cool early on in December, but was real pain as the months wore on.

As a film editor in Burbank, Calif., told the Times: "In my business, if you're over 40 you're too old. I passed that age a while ago, so it can be hard to get a job with younger producers."

Embrace the gray, I say.

You can have the vitality and still have the gray, after all. Age is as much about attitude as it is about its physical characteristics. If you feel gray, you're going to look and act gray. You can only go so far in remaking yourself into someone you're not.

In a way, I feel like I've earned my gray and I'm not ashamed to show it off, just as an officer likes to show his colonel's oak leaves or his general's stars. I feel my gray gives me rank when it comes to experience and wisdom. My gray shows I've been there and I've done that and I'm prepared to help others go there and do that.

There isn't much that surprises me anymore in the work place. There isn't much I haven't seen already, have had to deal with already -- all the good, the bad and the ugly of more than 30 years of work. As they say, I've got the gray hair to prove it. I've been Dad to babies, teens, high school students, college students and young adults about to make their way into the world of work. I don't think there's much they can throw at me at this point that I haven't seen already. I'm a cagey batter who's seen about every pitch that can be thrown.

My shingle as sage is out there, right on top of my head. And in order to be a sage you have to have the age and the gray hair to prove it.

It's all in your mind

I believe wholeheartedly in exercise -- both for the body and for the mind.

There's already a booming industry for the exercising the body -- we as a society spend $16 billion a year on health club memberships, not to mention what we spend on all the attendant gear and stuff that goes along with having a physically active lifestyle.

Now there's a growing industry for mental fitness. According to a recent article in the New York Times, products like computer software to spur brain activity are being gobbled up by Baby Boomers who are concerned about losing their mental acuity as they lose their hair, teeth, eyesight and hearing. The so-called neurosoftware market was worth $225 million in 2007, according to the Times article, and is expected to grow as Boomers advance in age. The Times estimate it could be a $2 billion industry by 2015.

Boomers, who have always thought of themselves as forever young, are realizing that their bodies and possibly their minds will break down over time. And they will not go gently into the night. Still believing we are as invincible at 60 or 70 as we were at 20 or 30, we will kick and scream and whine and try just about any means possible to hold off or delay the inevitability of aging.

You can understand why. Most of us at around 50 start to joke about our senior moments -- like forgetting where the car keys are, or forgetting a telephone number that we've dialed a bazillion times before. But our worry is that the senior moments might portend something more serious -- senior hours, days or years of dementia or Alzheimer's.

You know the moments.

The Times article offered a few of anecdotes: A 47-year-old woman misplaced her cellphone, only to find it in her refrigerator freezer when she went to make dinner. Or the 51-year-old woman who drove to work in her car but took the bus home after work after forgetting that she'd driven in. Or the 61-year-old man in the FedEx store who, while filling out the forms, could not remember his home address.

We might chuckle at these anecdotes, but most of us have "moments" of our own. One time coming back from skiing by myself, I went north onto a highway when I should have been traveling south. I was well on my way to Canada before realizing I'd made a wrong turn.

We worry that what's funny now might not be so funny later.

The Times has this telling quote from Nancy Ceridwyn, director of educational initiatives at the American Society on Aging: "It's probably one of the most frightening aspects of the changes we undergo as we age. Our memories are who we are. And if we lose our memories we lose that groundedness of who we are."

So Boomers are running with evidence that suggests brain exercises will help maintain mental fitness, or, as the Times article points out, help keep "the plasticity of the brain."

Nintendo has something called Brain Age 2 of math and memory exercises (originally devised for a youngster). There is "cognitive behavioral training" software. Beyond that, some Boomers are going to their doctors to ask for medical tests to determine if they already have the early stages or are at risk for Alzheimer's.

I'll stick with my crossword puzzles, thank you very much. For the record, my favorite is the Friday puzzle in the Wall Street Journal. But I'll take on all comers. I like the challenge; I like working the puzzles as much as my morning workouts at the YMCA.

Crosswords have served my mother well over the years. She may not want me revealing her exact age, but she's into her 80s and still chugging along quite nicely as she tackles her daily puzzles. We should all be so fortunate.

We have to stop meeting like this

You've heard it before: The more things change, the more things stay the same. Consider how we communicate and how we meet.

The way we communicate with each other has changed dramatically in the three plus decades of my professional life. There are times when we can't communicate face to face, either one on one or in a meeting. We've gone from the speed of a written letter or a Ma Bell telephone call or a fax to the lightning speed of cell phones, text messages, and e-mails. We can, if we wish, choose to be connected to each other seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

You don't have to just reach out and touch someone any more to communicate; you can reach out and grab them by the throat.

The way we meet face to face in groups, however, hasn't changed a bit. I have a long professional life -- some 33 years, most of them as a manager -- on which to base this judgment that most meetings in an office setting aren't very productive.

My daughter as a fourth grader in 1994 saw this when she came to the office as part of Bring Our Daughters to Work Day. I was a newspaper editor in Massachusetts at the time and her day with Dad, besides watching the afternoon paper get made up and spending time in the darkroom with my chief photographer, included three meetings -- one on a redesign of the newspaper, one on customer service, and one on a capital improvement plan at our local YMCA.

I had her write a story about her Work Day experience, and she concluded: "I wouldn't want to work there because they have very busy mornings, lots of computer work, lots of boring meetings, and a confusing job." I guess damaging her young psyche about meetings was enough to drive her to medicine and a doctorate degree this month in physical therapy. Smart move, kiddo.

Meetings that aren't structured or chaired well tend to meander and an hour or two later you wonder just what had been accomplished.

What's happened lately is that people, knowing meetings tend to wander, are bringing their cell phones -- their BlackBerrys and the like especially -- into the sessions. As a result meetings that were unproductive before have become even less productive.

You folks know who you are: You bring your BlackBerry to a meeting and, when the discussion flags just a bit, you pull out your phone under the table and start to read and respond to e-mails. (How many of them, even though they look like they're doing their e-mail, are actually playing the BrickBreaker game on their BlackBerry to pass the time?)

So it was interesting to me when I read recently about a New York law firm that banned BlackBerry and cell phone use during certain meetings. A managing partner of the law firm was quoted in a recent Wall Street Journal as saying: "BlackBerrys and cell phones were tremendously distracting. The meetings we have go much faster now." He suspects that participants focus on getting through the meeting more quickly so that they can get back to their phones and their instant access.

It's even become an issue in the classroom. I've talked to some educators who say that, despite a cell phone ban in most classes, high school and college kids are bringing their phones into class and texting and e-mailing away while the business of education is going on. How much you want to bet they'll bring those habits right into the meeting room of their first job?

Pretty soon, no one will be paying attention to anything anyone says in a meeting. You'll have to e-mail or text it to be heard.