My NYU music business department had a faculty meeting in the city last week – I really look forward to them.  Yes, look forward to a meeting.

I’ve figured out that what I like is the feeling of faculty being supported in their jobs – trusted to do the right things and to do everything we can to support our students in their academic life.  Isn’t that what we all want?

This year’s freshmen will have been born one year after YouTube was founded.  They have never attended school without practicing for active shooter drills.  They have never been without screens, computers, phones, TikTok.  And it will be interesting to see how much they rely on artificial intelligence to do their homework.

Many lectures, tests and books are forgotten but teachers who become mentors are not – I’ll bet you can name a few who made a real difference in your life.  And teachers are not just limited to school classrooms.

Muppets founder Jim Henson gets it:  “[Kids] don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”  And we’re all kids at heart.

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I can’t

I won’t

If only

Someday

Don’t

I hate

Impossible 

Dirty words like these shape the reality you end up trapped in or as the Persian poet Hafiz who blended love, spirituality and wit in his writing put it “The words you speak become the house you live in.”

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Whenever we fall short, we vow to try harder but trying harder also makes us less natural, less free to be ourselves.  I’d love to have a dollar for every time I said I’ll try harder.  Now the author Tim Gallwey says flat out and in ALL CAPS – “WHATEVER YOU’RE TRYING TO DO, DON’T”.

No one taught me to read a TelePrompTer when I started in television, I just learned.  No one taught me how to be a professor, I just started.  I never learned to be on the radio — I just did it when I got the chance.  I am sure you share some of these realities as well.  It’s about freedom to be you and me.

“Whatever you’re trying to do, don’t. Don’t try to do it and don’t try not to do it. Simply don’t try at all and see what happens.”

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I’m reading The Inner Game of Golf and came across something so non-golfy that I had to share it.

“The first step is to acknowledge that we are not born in self-doubt. It’s hard to find a very young child who doesn’t believe in himself. Children may trip and fall when learning to walk, or the castle that they are building may topple with a misplaced block, but such occurrences are not yet occasions for questioning oneself. In fact, observations of children before school age show they have an unquestioning faith in their abilities”.

Yikes!  Could we start doubting ourselves when we grow up and allow others to gain undue influence about how they feel about how we feel?

We aren’t born with self-doubt:  “You weren’t born doubting. You weren’t born discouraged. You weren’t born thinking negative things about yourself. Over time, the criticism … slowly convinced you otherwise.”

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A new analysis based on the Understanding America Study shows that smartphone use is rapidly eroding core personality traits in young adults, particularly conscientiousness — the quality tied to responsibility and self-control. In less than a decade, Americans aged 16 to 39 have dropped to the 30th percentile for this trait, while older adults remain largely unchanged.

This shift rivals the printing press in scope but is happening far faster, rewiring human cognition in just 15 years without the cultural adaptation that past revolutions allowed.

Smartphones are rapidly degrading young people’s ability to focus, follow through, and engage in real-world commitments and it’s happening so fast that society hasn’t had time to adapt, making the damage hard, if not impossible, to reverse.

Quick fixes like app timers or “digital detox” days won’t solve the problem — the starting point is acknowledging that the attention economy is built to exploit focus, then deliberately creating guardrails in daily life, like limiting phone access during key tasks, replacing screen time with in-person interaction, and treating attention like a finite resource to be conserved. 

While digital communication itself isn’t inherently bad, over-reliance on it erodes the deeper, real-world conversations and social engagement that build empathy, focus, and follow-through which is why MIT’s Sherry Turkle says “I’m not anti-technology. I’m pro-conversation.”

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I’ve got bad news for politicians if my young college students are indicative of a change – they just want to get along.  They want to compromise – these are seemingly dirty words in the world we live in.

They seek consensus not total victory and even though some (by no means all) are passionate about their views, most want what we used to have – cooperation.

When students disagree in class (at least my classes), they apologize if they interrupt and almost always let the other person have their say first.  This is not the world that is making headlines.

Some lean right, some lean left but it makes me optimistic that the shouting, insulting and bragging that takes place in politics, sports and even entertainment will give way to a friendlier discourse.

Mattie Stepanek was not a politician – he was a peace advocate who said “We don’t have to agree on anything to be kind to one another.”

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Kansas City Royals pitcher Gil Meche called his boss in 2011 to announce that he was retiring a year earlier – that he would walk away from the final year of his contract worth $12 million.

Meche was an All-Star in the first year and had other good years until a back injury began haunting him in 2009 – the team had a workaround, this starter would pitch from the bullpen in relief saving wear and tear on his body.

Here was his response as reported by The Athletic:  “You signed me as a starter, and I can’t fulfill that obligation.  I’m not going to take that money as a relief pitcher” according to the Royals GM at the time Dayton Moore.  Yes, he made about $50 million in his career but still, he’s walking away from an easy $12 million more?

In a world of greed, who does this?  Meche calls for a simplified life and he has enough money.

Principle and dignity over paycheck.  Chicago Bears legend Mike Ditka:  “There are some things more important than money. You can’t buy your self-respect.”

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Is it me or are people putting themselves down a lot more these days?  There has never been a shortage of other people willing to do it for you, but taking this matter into your own hands seems like needless self-sabotage.

Arthur Brooks writing in The Atlantic has a partial cure:  “Don’t talk to yourself like someone you hate.”  That kind of makes sense.  You wouldn’t talk to others like they are “an incompetent idiot”.  We’d be nicer than that.  Kinder self-talk is what we deserve even when we screw up or want to do much better.

So, change the inner dialogue as author Louise Hay suggests:  “You’ve been criticizing yourself for years and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.”

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I started my first business during a bad recession, a weekly publication for the radio industry.  Then I took it daily in a recession.  I started the publication I currently own (Inside Music Media) in a – you guessed it – recession.

I’m not that smart, but I have smart friends one of whom reassured me that the best time to start a new business is when everyone else is retreating.  That took a lot more guts than I thought I had.  I mention this because the new CEO of Zillow said he started there in 2009 on the tail of the real estate inspired recession during the subprime crisis – this guy Jeremy Wacksman is different.  The wildest thing he’s ever seen for sale on Zillow is a missile silo.  Nonetheless.

Start that thing (whatever it is) in spite of downturns or bad timing not because of them or as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman puts it “If you’re going to start a company, you might as well do it when things are tough. That’s when everyone else is giving up.”

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Before class students come in, sit down and text.  When class starts, I ask them to power down and stow digital devices and they rapidly adapt to in-person.  We take five minutes or so to talk to each other – me too! Yes, they get up to use the bathroom (My two classes are each an hour and forty minutes) and yes, they check their phones (in the hall before returning).

When class ends, they pull out their phones as they exit the room often leaving behind their coats and water bottles and even expensive Stanley Cups!  We have great in-class discussions and students often thank me for asking them to turn their phones off (in front of other students most of whom agree).

What I learned:  you can’t ask someone to give up the phone if you are not willing to offer them something of equal value.  Something interesting.  Something social with others. Maybe something surprising.

I am thinking about this a lot as I prepare to return for the fall semester and as I digest the latest research which shows we humans spend 50% of our waking hours on digital devices – that’s not good, not healthy and requires ways to wean ourselves back to real life.

In a TED Talk in 2012 MIT Professor Sherry Turkle highlighted how devices change our social expectations—and why in-person conversation is the higher-value offer: “We expect more from technology and less from each other.”

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