Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: A Novel (Ben Fountain) • a function of Day’s black yin yoked to Dime’s honky yang. (34) • he is a citizen of the realms of neutral buoyancy. (35) • stoic vein of male Americanism defined by multiple generations of movie and TV actors, which conveniently furnishes him a way of being without having to think about it too much. (37) • these verbal arabesques that spark and snap in Billy’s ears like bugs impacting an electric bug zapper (37) • There’s something harsh in his fellow Americans, avid, ecstatic, a burning that comes of the deepest need. That’s his sense of it, they all need something from him, this pack of half-rich lawyers, dentists, soccer moms, and corporate VPs, they’re all gnashing for a piece of a barely grown grunt making $14,800 a year. For these adult, affluent people he is mere petty cash in their personal accounting, yet they lose it when they enter his personal space. They tremble. They breathe in fitful, stinky huffs. Their eyes skitz and quiver with the force of the moment, because here, finally, up close and personal, is the war made flesh, an actual point of contact after all the months and years of reading about the war, watching the war on TV, hearing the war flogged and flacked on talk radio. It’s been hard times in America—how did we get this way? So scared all the time, and so shamed at being scared through the long dark nights of worry and dread, days of rumor and doubt, years of drift and slowly ossifying angst. You listened and read and watched and it was just, so, obvious, what had to be done, a mental tic of a mantra that became second nature as the war dragged on. Why don’t they just . . . Send in more troops. Make the troops fight harder. Pile on the armor and go in blazing, full-frontal smackdown and no prisoners. And by the way, shouldn’t the Iraqis be thanking us? Somebody needs to tell them that, would you tell them that, please? Or maybe they’d like their dictator back. Failing that, drop bombs. More and bigger bombs. Show these persons the wrath of God and pound them into compliance, and if that doesn’t work then bring out the nukes and take it all the way down, wipe it clean, reload with fresh hearts and minds, a nuclear slum clearance of the country’s soul. Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives. (37) Page 40 they know they’re being good when they thank the troops and their eyes shimmer with love for themselves and this tangible proof of their goodness. Page 41 karma account, that running tally of good and evil that Shroom described to him as the expression, the mental crystallization, as it were, of the great cosmic tilt toward ultimate justice. 44 No matter their age or station in life, Billy can’t help but regard his fellow Americans as children. They are bold and proud and certain in the way of clever children blessed with too much self-esteem, and no amount of lecturing will enlighten them as to the state of pure sin toward which war inclines. He pities them, scorns them, loves them, hates them, these children. These boys and girls. These toddlers, these infants. Americans are children who must go somewhere else to grow up, and sometimes die. Page 48 the guy who seems about 60 percent there about 40 percent of the time. Page 51 He wanted to punch someone. Rich people make him nervous for no particular reason, they just do, and standing by the hostess station in his kudzu-green class A’s Billy felt about as belonging here as a wino pissing his pants. Page 56 The men have the hale good looks and silver hair of successful bank presidents or midsized-city mayors, tanned, fit sixty-year-olds who can still bring the heat on their tennis serves. Their wives are substantially but not offensively younger, all blondes, all displaying the taut architectonics of surgical self-improvement. So proud, the men say, going around shaking hands. So grateful, so honored. Guardians. Freedoms. Fanatics. TerrRr. The wives hang back and let their men do the honors, they look on with vaguely wistful smiles and not an ounce of evident lust. Page 59 So perhaps, it occurs to Billy, this is the whole point of civilization, the eating of beautiful meals and the taking of decorous dumps, in which case he is for it, having had a bellyful of the other way. Page 65 You’ve got your business and we’ve got ours, so you just keep on drilling, sir, and we’ll keep on killing.” Page 66 the dynamic of all such encounters, the Bravos speak from the high ground of experience. They are authentic. They are the Real. Page 66 Here in the chicken-hawk nation of blowhards and bluffers, Bravo always has the ace of bloods up its sleeve. Page 78 “Some days I think I’m living in a bad country song,” Page 98 how certain people had avoided Vietnam. Cheney, four educational deferments, then a hardship 3-A. Limbaugh, 4-F thanks to a cyst on his ass. Pat Buchanan, 4-F. Newt Gingrich, grad school deferment. Karl Rove, did not serve. Bill O’Reilly, did not serve. John Ashcroft, did not serve. Bush, AWOL from the Air National Guard, with a check mark in the “do not volunteer” box as to service overseas. Page 103 There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one. Page 112 famously nipped, tucked, tweaked, jacked, exfoliated mug that for years has been a staple of state and local news, Norm’s very public saga of cosmetic self-improvement. The result thus far is compelling and garish, like a sales lot for reconditioned carnival rides. Page 114 Mortal fear is the ghetto of the human soul, to be free of it something like the psychic equivalent of inheriting a hundred million dollars. Page 114 Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all, and as every combat soldier knows there are as many incarnations and species of fear as the Eskimo language has words for snow. Page 115 Works on your mind, all that. The randomness. He gets so tired of living with the daily beat-down of it, not just the normal animal fear of pain and death but the uniquely human fear of fear itself like a CD stuck on skip-repeat, an ever-narrowing self-referential loop that may well be a form of madness. Page 114 the luxury of terror as a talking point, Page 131 All the fakeness just rolls right off them, maybe because the nonstop sales job of American life has instilled in them exceptionally high thresholds for sham, puff, spin, bullshit, and outright lies, in other words for advertising in all its forms. Billy himself never noticed how fake it all is until he’d done time in a combat zone. Page 137 he wonders by what process virtually any discussion about the war seems to profane these ultimate matters of life and death. As if to talk of such things properly we need a mode of speech near the equal of prayer, otherwise just shut, shut your yap and sit on it, silence being truer to the experience than the star-spangled spasm, the bittersweet sob, the redeeming hug, or whatever this fucking closure is that everybody’s always talking about. They want it to be easy and it’s just not going to be. Page 140 Alpine crevasses of dizzying cleavage into which a man could fall, never to be seen or heard from again. Page 165 Dude, maybe they don’t hate our freedoms, maybe they hate our fat! Page 164 It seemed that football must be made to be productive and useful, a net-plus benefit for all mankind, hence the endless motivational yawping about teamwork, sacrifice, discipline, and other modern virtues, the basic thrust of which boiled down to shut up and do as you’re told. So despite the terrific violence inherent in the game a weird passivity seeped into your mind. All those rules, all the maxims, all the three-hour practices where you mostly stood around waiting your turn to be screamed at by an assistant coach, they produced an almost pleasurable numbness, a general dulling of perception and responsiveness. In a way it was nice, constantly being told what to do, except after a while it got boring as hell, and at a certain age you started to realize that most of the coaches were actually dumb as rocks. Page 166 Okay, so maybe they aren’t the greatest generation by anyone’s standard, but they are surely the best of the bottom third percentile of their own somewhat muddled and suspect generation. Page 172 Where else but America could football flourish, America with its millions of fertile acres of corn, soy, and wheat, its lakes of dairy, its year-round gushers of fruits and vegetables, and such meats, that extraordinary pipeline of beef, poultry, seafood, and pork, feedlot gorged, vitamin enriched, and hypodermically immunized, humming factories of high-velocity protein production, all of which culminate after several generations of epic nutrition in this strain of industrial-sized humans? Only America could produce such giants. Page 183 Only America could take such a product-intensive sport and grow it into the civic necessity it is today. Page 184 Billy tries to imagine the vast systems that support these athletes. They are among the best-cared-for creatures in the history of the planet, beneficiaries of the best nutrition, the latest technologies, the finest medical care, they live at the very pinnacle of American innovation and abundance, which inspires an extraordinary thought—send them to fight the war! Send them just as they are this moment, well rested, suited up, psyched for brutal combat, send the entire NFL! Page 186 the Christian Bible is mostly a compilation of old Sumerian legends, not something he particularly needed to know at the time but which has afforded some solace during these past two weeks of practically nonstop public prayer. America loves to pray, God knows. America prays and prays and prays, it is the land of unchained prayer, and Page 194 “I’m sure I was,” he answers. “I know I was. But it happened so fast I didn’t have time to think. I just did what my training told me to do, like anybody else in the squad would do. I just happened to be the guy in position.” He assumes he’s done, but they’re quiet, still primed for the payoff, so he has to think of something else. “I guess it’s like my sergeant says, as long as you’ve got plenty of ammo, you’ll probably be okay.” This does it; they throw back their heads and roar. In a way it’s so easy, all he has to do is say what they want to hear and they’re happy, they love him, everybody gets along. Sometimes he has to remind himself there’s no dishonor in it. He hasn’t told any lies, he doesn’t exaggerate, yet so often he comes away from these encounters with the sleazy, gamey aftertaste of having lied. Page 197 Here at home everyone is so sure about the war. They talk in certainties, imperatives, absolutes, views that seem quite reasonable in the context. A kind of abyss separates the war over here from the war over there, and the trick, as Billy perceives it, is not to stumble when jumping from one to the other. Page 214 I’m not like that guy who goes around saying greed is good, but it can sure as heck be a force for good. Self-interest is a powerful motivator in human affairs, and to me that’s the beauty of the capitalist system, it makes a virtue out of an innate human flaw. It’s why you’re gonna live better than your parents, and your kids are gonna live better than you, and their kids better than them and so on, because thanks to our system we’re going to keep on finding more ways, easier and better ways, to solve the problems of living and accomplish so many things we never even dreamed of.” Page 220 Billy has these visions sometimes, these brief sightlines into America as a nightmare of superabundance, but Army life in general and the war in particular have rendered him acutely sensitive to quantity. Page 222 Happily there is retail at every turn so the crowd doesn’t lack for buying opportunities, and it’s the same everywhere Bravo has been, the airports, the hotels, the arenas and convention centers, in the downtowns and the suburbs alike, retail dominates the land. Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached. Page 223 This is where the vital part of her energy goes, into the semi-mystical, all-consuming, positive-thinking hustle for exposure and notice, the miracle moment of prime time that will lead to the big break. She wants to be on TV. She wants to be a star. Page 223 they emanate the worst of both worlds, rural sloth plus urban malevolence. Page 235 He’s too self-conscious and church-averse to accept a completely straight notion of god, so how about this—chemicals, hormones, needs and drives, whatever is in us that’s so supreme and terrifying that we have to call it divine. Page 235 They love to talk up God and country but it’s the devil they propose, all those busy little biochemical devils of sex and death and war that simmer at the base of the skull, punch up the heat a few degrees and they rise to a boil, spill over the sides. Do they even know? he wonders. Maybe they don’t know what they know, given that what he sees before him is so random, so perfect, porn-lite out of its mind on martial dope. Page 245 Somehow their faces have ended up mere inches apart, and this seems like the most natural thing in the world, as basic as wind, tides, the magnetic north. Page 249 It makes him aware of himself being aware of himself, and here is a mystery that seems worth thinking about, why this stacking of awareness should even matter. At the moment all he knows is that there’s structure in it, a pleasing sense of poise or mental ordering. A kind of knowledge, or maybe a bridge thereto—as if existence didn’t necessarily have to be a moron’s progress of lurching from one damn thing to another? As if you might aspire to some sort of context in your life, a condition he associates with adultness. Page 259 | Billy moans with the pleasure and pain of it, these violent oppositional forces that are physically molding him into something new. Page 270 You die by the slow no in this business, lemme get back to you, lemme get back to you, lemme get back to you, everybody’s so scared of screwing up they’d rather lose a kidney than make an actual business decision. Page 276 the paralytic force field of his mesmerizing narcissism. Page 306 they are the ones in charge, these saps, these innocents, their homeland dream is the dominant force. His reality is their reality’s bitch; what they don’t know is more powerful than all the things he knows, and yet he’s lived what he’s lived and knows what he knows, which means what, something terrible and possibly fatal, he suspects. To learn what you have to learn at the war, to do what you have to do, does this make you the enemy of all that sent you to the war? Their reality dominates, except for this: It can’t save you. It won’t stop any bombs or bullets. He wonders if there’s a saturation point, a body count that will finally blow the homeland dream to smithereens. How much reality can unreality take? Page 307 How does anyone ever know anything—the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the ultimate black hole of futile speculation.

Daniel Pink— Drive

Type I (intrinsically motivated) and Type X (extrinsically motivated)

"self-determination theory"
The main mechanisms of Motivation 2.0 are more stifling than supportive...the less salient they are the better. When people use rewards to motivate, that's when they're most demotivating...instead, create environments where our innate psychological needs can flourish.

Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.

Type I behavior is made, not born.
Type I's almost always outperform Type X's in the long run.
Type I behavior does not disdain money or recognition.
If an employee's compensation doesn't hit the baseline— i.e doesn't pay her an adequate amount, or if her pay isn't equitable compared to others doing similar work— that person's motivation will crater, regardless of whether that person in Type I or Type X...one reason adequate pay is so essential is that it tkaes the issue of money off the table so they can focus on the work itself.
Recognition is similar. Type I's like to be recognized for their accomplishments because recognition is a form of feedback...but it is not the goal itself.

Type I behavior is a renewable resource.

Type I behavior promotes greater physical and mental well-being.
Ultimately it depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose...self-directed...connects the quest for excellence to a larger purpose.

Autonomy
Our default setting is to be autonomous and self-directed. Unfortunately, circumstances— including outdated notions of "management"— often conspire to change that default setting and turn us from Type I to Tyoe X. To encourage Type I behavior, and the high performance, it enables, the first requirement is autonomy. People need autonomy over task (what they do), time (when they do it), team (who they do it with), and technique (how they do it). Companies that offer autonomy, sometimes in radical doses, are outperforming their competitors. (what about due dates)

Mastery
While Motivation 2.0 required compliance. Motivation 3.0 demands engagement. Only engagement can produce mastery— becoming better at something that matters. And the pursuit of mastery, an important but often dormant part of our third drive, has become essential to making one's way in the economy.
Mastery begins with "flow"— optimal experiences when the challenges we face are exquisitely matched to our abilities. Small workplaces therefore supplement day-to-day activities with "Goldilocks tasks"— not too hard and not too easy. But mastery also abides by three peculiar rules:
• Mastery is mindset: it requires the capacity to see your abilities not as finite, but as infinitely improvable.
• Mastery is pain: it demands effort, grit, and deliberate practice.
• Mastery is an asymptote: it's impossible to fully realize, which makes it simultaneously frustrating and alluring.

Purpose
Humans, by their nature, seek purpose— a cause greater and more enduring than themselves. But traditional business have long considered purpose ornamental— a perfectly nice accessory, so long as it didn't get in the way of the important things.
But that's changing— thanks in part to the rising tide of baby boomers reckoning with their own mortality. In Motivation 3.0, purpose maximization is taking its place alongside profit maximization as an aspiration and a guiding principle. Within organizations, this new "purpose motive" is expressing itself in three ways: — in goals that use profit to reach purpose;
— in words that emphasize more than self-interest;
— in policies that allow people to pursue purpose on their own terms.
This move to accompany profit maximization with purpose maximization has the potential to rejuvenate businesses and remake our world.

Daniel Pink— Drive

The Rise and Fall of Motivation 2.0

• Motivation 1.0— biological motivations that come from within

• Motivation 2.0— external rewards and punishments delivered by the environment

•Motivation 3.0— 'intrinsic motivation' fueled by the innate, internal desire for Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose"self-motivation"

Motivation 2.0 has endured for a very long time due to industrialization and Frederick Taylor's "Scientific Management" (workers are just small cogs in the 'machine' that is a company or business); however, as scientifically proven, it can actually work to undermine the goals it professes to achieve— once you introduce monetary rewards into work it actually reduces people's pure enjoyment of a task and therefore reduces their productivity; this is especially applicable in relation to heuristic (open-ended) tasks versus algorithmic (rote) tasks; similar to Ariely's social/moral norms versus market norms (once you pay people for volunteering it no longer has its moral value and is thus less satisfying on an intrinsic level; money as a reward can become addicting— you need more of it each time you want to 'inspire' someone to do a task s/he obviously didn't want to do to begin with

Why Carrot and Sticks Don't (Often) Work

Seven Deadly Flaws of Carrots and Sticks:
1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.
2. They can diminish performance.
3. They can crush creativity.
4. They can crowd out good behavior.
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior. (most recently, like the teachers and administrators in Atlanta Schools)
6. They can become addictive.
7. They can foster short-term thinking.

If you have routine/rote task that must be done and you need to offer a reward (which can be effective in these circumstances), make sure you:
— offer a rationale for why the task is necessary;
— acknowledge that the task is boring;
— allow people to complete the task their own way. (doesn't sound like a lot of assignments in school)
Then offer an extrinsic reward that is unexpected (i.e. not necessarily promised at the beginning of the task). Engage in "now that" rewarding versus "if-then."

Daniel Pink— Real Brainstorming

Based on Tom Kelley's book, The Ten Faces of Innovation:

1) Go for quantity.
Good ideas emerge from lots of ideas. Set a numerical goal— say, a total of one hundred.

2) Encourage Wild Ideas.
Extremism is a virtue. The right idea often flows from what initially seems outlandish.

3) Be Visual.
Pictures unlock creativity.

4) Defer Judgment.
There's no such thing as a bad idea, so banish the naysayers. Think creatively first and critically later.

5) One conversation at a time.
Listen, be polite, and build on others' suggestions.

Capture everything in writing.

Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind

High Concept, High Touch

High Concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention.

High Touch involves the ability to empathize, to understand the subtleties of hyman interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian, in pursuit of purpose and meaning.

The Six Senses

DESIGN
It's economically crucial and personally rewarding to create something beautiful, whimsical, or emotionally engaging.
A combination of utility enhanced by significance...far more accessible to the masses both in terms of exposure and generation (democratization of design)...Design is inter-disciplinary... ultimate purpose— changing the world.

STORY
It's not enough to marshal an effective argument...The essence of persuasion, communication, and self-understanding has become the ability also to fashion a compelling narrative.
Context enriched by emotion...a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters...Stories are easier to remember because stories are how we remember...'humans are not ideally set-up to understand logic; they are ideally set-up to understand stories.' An organization's knowledge is contained in its stories.

SYMPHONY
What's in greatest demand today isn't analysis but synthesis— seeing the big picture, crossing boundaries, and being able to combine disparate pieces into an arresting new whole.
To detect broad patterns rather than to deliver specific answers; to invent something new by combining elements nobody thought to pair...perspective is more important than IQ...be a "boundary-crosser"...risk thinking unconventional thoughts...convention is the enemy of progress..."imaginative rationality"— mastery of metaphor...MQ (Metaphor Quotient)...the more we understand the appropriate personal metaphors, the better we understand ourselves...relationships between relationships...

EMPATHY
What will distinguish those who thrive will be their ability to understand what makes their fellow woman or man tick, to forge relationships, and to care for others...to imagine yourself in someone else's position and to intuit what that person is feeling...to stand in others' shoes, to see it with their eyes, and to feel with their hearts (as opposed to sympathy— feeling bad for someone).
Good designers put themselves into the mind of whoever is going to be experiencing the product or service they're designing...understand context... (Paul Ekman)

PLAY
In the Conceptual Age, we all need to play...Too much sobriety can be bad for your career and worse for your general well-being.

MEANING
Abundance has freed us from day-today struggles and allowed millions of people to pursue more significant desires: purpose, transcendence, and spiritual fulfillment.

Jim Collins— Good to Great, The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity Within the Three Circles)

The Hedgehog Concept is a simple, crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection of the following three circles:

1) What you can be the best in the world at (and equally important, what you cannot become the best in the world at). This discerning standard goes far beyond core competence. Just because you possess a core competence doesn't mean you can be the best in the world at it. Conversely, what you can be the best in the world at might not even be something in which you are currently engaged.

2) What drives your economic engine. (single denominator-- cash flow per x)

3) What you are deeply passionate about. The idea here is not to stimulate passion but to discover what makes you passionate.

A Hedgehog Concept is not a goal to be the best, a strategy to be the best, an intention to be the best, a plan to be the best. It is an understanding of what you can be the best at.

It takes four years on average to get a Hedgehog Concept.

Characteristics of the Council:
1. The Council exists as a device to gain understanding about important issues facing an organization.
2. The Council is assembled and used by the leading executive and usually consists of five to twelve people.
3. Each Council member has the ability to argue and debate in search of understanding, not from an egoistic need to win a point or protect a parochial interest.
4. Each Council member retains respect of every other Council member, without exception.
5. Council members come from a range of perspectives, but each member has deep knowledge about some aspect of the organization and/or the environment in which it operates.
6. The Council includes key member of the management team but is not limited to members of the management team, not is every executive automatically a member.
7. The Council is a standing body, not an ad hoc committee assembled for a specific project.
8. The Council meets periodically, as much as once a week or as infrequently as once per quarter.
9. The Council does not seek consensus, recognizing that consensus decisions are often at odds with intelligent decisions. The responsibility for the final decision remains with the leading executive.
10. The Council is an informal body, not listed on any formal organization chart or formal documents.

Jim Collins— Good to Great, Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith)

Confront the brutal facts of your current situation.

When you start with an honest and diligent effort to determine the truth of your situation, the right decisions often become self-evident. It is impossible to make good decisions without infusing the entire process with an honest confrontation of the brutal facts.

Creating a climate where the truth is heard involves four basic practices:
1) Lead with questions, not answers.
2) Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion.
3) Conduct autopsies, without blame.
4) Build red flag mechanisms that turn information into information that cannot be ignored.

Indeed, for those of you with a strong, charismatic personality, it is worthwhile to consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems, when people filter the brutal facts from you. You can overcome the liabilities of having charisma, but it does require conscious attention.

Yes, leadership is about vision. But leadership is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts confronted. There's a huge difference between the opportunity to "have your say" and the opportunity to be heard. Great leaders understand this distinction, creating a culture wherein people had a tremendous opportunity to be heard, and ultimately, for the truth to be heard.

Leading from good to great does not mean coming up with the answers and then motivating everyone to follow your messianic vision. It means having the humility to grasp the fact that you do not yet understand enough to have the answers and then to ask the questions that will lead to the best possible insights.

** The Stockdale Paradox**:

Retain faith that you will prevail in the end regardless of the difficulties.
AND at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.

Spending time and energy trying to "motivate" people is a waste of time and effort. The real question is not, "How do we motivate our people?" If you have the right people, they will be self-motivated. The key is to not de-motivate them. One of the primary ways to de-motivate people is to ignore the brutal facts of reality.