By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Jan 10, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET
If you are in your 20s or 30s –or even early 40s–and feel overwhelmed and under-appreciated, I implore you to hang in there and not give up.
If you can make it to 50, everything changes. Being 50 is awesome. It’s no accident they call it “the prime of your life.” Everything comes together and you finally feel like you are, indeed, master of your fate; captain of your soul.
Being 50 is like being a senior classmen (after your parents held you back two years in kindergarten to give you an edge over the other kids). You know how everything works–and others look to you to show them. You are truly on top of your world. Finally.
 Everyday you feel like you are a BMOC (Big Man On Campus) Except it’s not a campus; it’s your life. Which is even better.
The only problem with being 50 and feeling on top of the world is you have trouble remembering why you feel so together and invincible.
I have found writing down all the reasons (like the ones I just listed above) and keeping the list handy on the notepad of your smartphone or on a piece of notepaper you keep in your pocket is very helpful, if not essential.
Otherwise you just look like a blissfully happy idiot who has no idea what is going on and others will start to suspect you aren’t as together as they initially believed.
So, if you are a young adult and stressed out and depressed, the good news is it will get much easier and much better. Even if you can’t remember why.
Just hang in there. And copy this list to your smartphone notepad. Trust me on this. This list is the difference between being a C level executive at 50 and a greeter at Walmart. The two positions require the same basic skill set, except the former exudes a great deal of confidence and cocksureness. And carries a list like this in their pocket.
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Jan 9, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET Tom Mabe’s most popular –and depressing—prank yet.
Louisvillian Tom Mabe is a very talented and funny guy. He’s the ultimate social media prankster and very clever and provocative as he pushes the comedic envelope.
His latest exploit …didn’t feel as funny as usual to me, though. Perhaps his most popular prank to date (at least in YouTube views, now over 17 million), Mabe tricks a hard drinking buddy who has passed out from intoxication (again) that he has been in a coma for 10 years and missed out on a lot of important life moments due to his excessive drinking.
It’s tough love that overlaps into cringe humor.
It is a brilliantly clever prank that was hopefully going to scare Mabe’s friend straight. The friend already has 5 DUIs and wasn’t changing his drinking habits. Tom was trying to help a friend, help protect others, and create a viral video at the same time. And I hope he succeeded with all three objectives.. The video’s viral popularity is already established.
But did it help his friend? I’m not so sure. In my view, a prank like that, by itself, rarely has a long term impact on the drinker. But the 17 million views of this video means that the secret on this heavy drinker is now out—something that most everyone knows or will soon hear about in this gentlemen’s home town.
That public intolerance for his alcohol abuse will mean he’ll have to change to stay in his current community or live elsewhere. But a few more days passed and the video prank continued to gnaw at me for some reason. My self-righteous conclusions weren’t enough to satisfy me.
There was something else going on in this video that was vaguely haunting me. And, I suspect, vaguely haunting others because several friends brought it up to me. For me the metaphor of going into a coma for 10 years and missing out on important life moments, saddened me. In some ways I am guilty of that. And I am not in a medical coma and don’t drink alcohol. But that doesn’t mean I (we) can’t go on auto-pilot, get too obsessed with work, hobbies, other distractions and miss out on some important memories with our children, spouse and friends. And that, in the end, is what I learned most from this video. It’s unintended consequences.
A prank to scare a heavy drinker straight by outing him was a very funny scheme. But what was profound –and perhaps ultimately more socially beneficial from this video–is that as much as we 17 million viewers want to laugh and feel superior to the drunken foil in this prank, I suspect a significant portion of us were simultaneously trying to conceal our sadness that we’d been outed too.
I hope Mabe’s friend does get help and get sober or at least stop driving while drinking. But whatever happens to Tom Mabe’s boozing friend, I hope this video helps change me in ways so that 10 years from now I don’t feel like portions of that time were spent in my own metaphorical coma.
Because, thanks to Tom Mabe’s prank, I now have a clearer idea of what that looks like and how horrifyingly tragic it can be.
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Dec 30, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
 Click here to purchase his first book My second book and the fear of too much success.
I almost have enough new posts to put out a second book of Musings from the Middle before Christmas. But am not sure I have the time to risk having a blockbuster best seller.
It made me think of the time as a teenager I was shooting craps with friends and had failed to roll a pass for 10 consecutive rolls.
My logic before doubling down my bet for the 11th roll was “Since I had failed to roll a pass 10 times in a row I had much greater than usual odds to succeed on my 11th roll.” But I didn’t and lost my last dollar.
Later a math teacher explained to ne that if I flipped a coin 10 times in a row and it was heads each time on the 11th flip it would still only be a 50-50 chance of it being tails. I never liked that math teacher and always thought he was overly pessimistic about life.
So since my first book only has sold in the very high two digits (almost low three digits) and is ranked, like, two trillionth in sales rank on Amazon.com my old logic is returning and telling me if the first book was a complete sales failure the chances of a second book being a great success is pretty much guaranteed. At least if you look at the numbers, understand my logic, and have an optimistic mathematical view of the world, unlike my former math teacher.
Sometimes you just have to go for it and take the risk in life even when logic dictates you won’t have the time to handle your overehelming success. Just do it anyway and figure it out later.
And besides, what’s the worst that can happen? Sales jn the high two digits again? Heck, that would only means a third book would likely be a sure NY Times best seller.
By Jeff Smith, on Tue Dec 24, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET From St. Louis Magazine:
 A few years ago, Missouri state Sen. Jeff Smith was caught lying to the feds about the funding for a certain political-attack mailer and wound up sentenced to a year behind bars. The charismatic young progressive, who has since left prison and politics behind, contributed a chapter to the new book The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis. He tells confessional, instructive stories about what he learned from his mistakes. His chapter begins with a grabber—being strip-searched as he enters the lock-up.
Is the book literally a practical guide for politicians who’ve stumbled, or does it have a broader purpose? To some extent, it’s designed to be a guide, but in a broader way, it’s designed to give anyone who’s going through tough times a lot of ways to handle situations more appropriately, more effectively, in a way that’s healthier. For instance, let’s say you’re a salesman and you’re trying to sell widgets and the company you’re selling to says, “You knock 10 percent off that $1.7 million you just quoted me, and we’ll make it worth your while.” These things are often not so blunt, though. People in everyday life encounter ethical dilemmas in everything they do. The book provides a lot of insight into the mistakes that those of us in the public eye have made that mushroom out of control. Hopefully that can help a lot of people prevent their situations from ever getting to that stage. Most people are not going to be Eliot Spitzer or Anthony Weiner, plastered all over the tabloids, but we all live in a constant state of trying to do the right thing.
The book offers tales of woe from a bunch of former politicians being painfully honest, more so than you usually expect from politicians. We are all pretty vulnerable in that book. We’re getting deep, talking about the lowest moments in our lives, and we’re hoping it transcends people’s typical views of politicians as full of crap and constantly dissembling. There’s not a lot of that in this book.
How did you get involved with the Recovering Politician blog? There are two guys—the former secretary of state of Kentucky and the former treasurer of Kentucky—they started it. My ex-girlfriend had worked in Kentucky, and I met one of these guys. The two of them got together and brainstormed at the time I had just come out of prison, and it came together by happenstance. They asked me to write an essay about my experience, and it went from there.
In a candid column for the Recovering Politician website, you wrote about how the revelation that you’d spent a year in prison got the attention of a group of jaded young people at a party in Brooklyn. Is that a weird feeling, to have a certain street cred by virtue of having served time? Yeah, it’s weird. But you have to try to always let people remember a couple of things—that a lot of people in prison aren’t very much different from them, and that even the ones they think are very different aren’t as different as they think. I try not to let people “go slumming” off my experience. What I’m concerned about is the complete lack of rehabilitation in most prisons and the effect that has.
You’ve had some time, since November 2010, that you’ve been out of prison and the halfway house you went to after prison. Have you gotten some emotional distance from everything? Yes and no. I’ve gotten involved in a lot of activities related to prison issues. Compared to 2011, well, then I wasn’t ready to engage in a lot of stuff like that. But in the last six months, I’ve been spending a lot more time on those issues. I gave a speech at the Cleveland State Prison in Texas to several hundred graduates of one of their programs. The experience of being back inside was emotional. I’m working on a book about my experience in prison and how it’s informed my views on prison policy, and about how we can do a better job leveraging of the untapped talent in our prisons and cut our spending and reduce our recidivist rate.
In 2010, you told SLM’s Jeannette Cooperman that academe “does not even resemble the real world… One of my objectives is to try to explore ways to better connect poli sci with real-world politics.” Now you’re the assistant professor of politics and advocacy at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy at the New School in New York. Is that what you’re doing there? Yes. In fact, in the next week or two, I have to turn in my dossier, which is my giant file of everything I’ve done in the past few years, for my job renewal, and the opening of that is a statement of purpose, what you’re trying to do in academia. My goals are to help infuse academia with more of an understanding of real-world politics and to give students a better understanding of how things really work, what people who haven’t been in the game might not know. Conversely, I try to bring some of the social-science discipline and analytical training into the public world.
Click here to read the full piece.
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Dec 23, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET I am getting a little nervous.
Everything I use each day seems to have a new updated version that needs to be downloaded every six months or so.
I am 50 years old and can’t remember the last time I offered an updated download for myself.
I hope no one js getting suspicious that I may not have one.
I am starting to feel like the driver of a car that has driven 50,000 miles and has forgotten ever to get an oil change– and there are no Valvoline stations in sight.
I am just going to pretend I have one even though there is nothing really to download. Kind of like a placebo or sugar pill to make us feel better but has no medical use. Just psychological. I think that’s what a lot of these tech updated downloads are anyway.
So…For the latest updated version of me, John Y Brown III, please click here. And use your imagination. While taking a sugar pill.
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Dec 17, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET Being 50 years old gives one a lot of advantages over those young upstarts gunning for us in the rough and tumble business world.
But sometimes you try and try and try and try again.
And no matter where you are or who is around or who there is to look to for help….
And no matter how hard you keep trying as everyone around you is watching and waiting and listening and waiting some more….
You just can’t remember what you were going to say.
At least you think you can’t remember it. In fact, you can’t even remember if you forgot what you originally thought you forgot and now realize you may not have even been talking about the topic you thought you had lost your train of thought on in the first place.
It’s not so much embarrassing when that happens as it is liberating.
So, you just laugh and go along with it and finish that story just the way you feel it probably was supposed to end. Or at least possibly was supposed to end. Or hope, if it wasn’t the way it was supposed to end, no one notices. Or if they did notice, since they are about your age, maybe they will forget in about 15 minutes.
And if there are any of those young hot shots standing around looking at you and grinning knowingly like a vulture circling its prey before it breaths its final breath, stare them down with a look that says unmistakeably, “All I have to do is make one call and you’ll never work in this industry again. Got that?!”
Now….what were we talking about again?
By Jason Grill, on Tue Dec 17, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
By Jonathan Miller, on Mon Dec 16, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET If you are a fellow #upper, particularly a fan of the Steve Kornacki version of MSNBC’s “Up,” you undoubtedly have watched the best political game show on TV — “Up Against the Clock.” Typically hosted by Kornacki, the all-time leading scorer on the show had been contributing RP (and MSNBC “The Cycle” co-host) Krystal Ball.
Well, this week. Krystal guest hosted for Steve, and the game show featured new contestant, and fellow contributing RP, Jeff Smith. And who’d have thunk it, but Jeff emerged as the Greatest Of All Time Up Against the Clock contestant. Watch him stumble over a Judd Gregg question, and then make a miraculous recovery to claim the all-time championship:
By RP Staff, on Fri Dec 13, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Terrific piece from Beth Reinhard in the National Journal about political class warfare in rural America. Here’s an excerpt that features our own RP:
Kentucky’s governor, Steve Beshear, is the only one in the South to have embraced Medicaid expansion and set up a state-based health insurance exchange. And for that, he’s being hailed as a Democratic leader who is paving populist inroads for his party among blue-collar whites. If enough of those so-called Reagan Democrats benefit from Obamacare, the thinking goes, they may start to view the Democratic Party as a friend to working people instead of as an enabler of welfare cheats.
“Kentucky is the 47 percent,” said the state’s former treasurer, Jonathan Miller, a Democrat who served in Beshear’s administration after unsuccessfully running against him for governor in 2007. “It’s been a very hypocritical electorate that wants those entitlement programs to protect their families but at the same time doesn’t want big government or elites in Washington interfering in their lives. But I think Beshear’s passion for this issue might start turning the tide.”
It’s a tough sell, however, to those who feel government has never done anything but screw them over. Rupe was disgusted when a follow-up letter about his Medicaid application included a voter-registration form. “I guess that’s the really important thing on their mind,” he grumbled.
In fact, the politics of Obamacare are so volatile that Lundergan Grimes refuses to say explicitly whether she supports Medicaid expansion in Kentucky. As a Democrat trying to navigate this Obama-wary red state, she has cautiously cast herself as more critic than cheerleader for the health care law. “As Alison has said for months, there are parts of the Affordable Care Act that need to be fixed, and the law is far from perfect,” Norton said. When addressing the struggles of low-income Kentuckians, Lundergan Grimes prefers to focus on the more popular cause of raising the minimum wage.
Indeed, the coming debate in Congress over the minimum wage will give Democrats another chance to try to win over the blue-collar whites who have long viewed them as sops for a welfare state beholden to minorities. If Lundergan Grimes, for example, can peel some of those voters away from McConnell, she has a chance to oust one of the most powerful Republicans in the country.
Republicans don’t have to trash the safety net to win elections. Congressional candidate Vance McAllister threw his support behind Medicaid expansion and trounced an Obamacare-bashing fellow Republican in a special election last month in Louisiana. Even Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu hailed McAllister’s victory, saying it proves that opposition to expanding Medicaid is a “political loser.”
“It’s unfair to say Republicans don’t care about poverty, but they should be held accountable for coming up with proposals,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economic adviser to 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain and the president of the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank. “I expect they will have to if they want to be seen as solution-oriented problem solvers who win elections instead of just opposing Obama’s agenda.”
If Louisiana hadn’t rejected the additional Medicaid money available under Obamacare, about 400,000 poor people would be eligible for government-funded health insurance. Across the country, an estimated 5.4 million people would have qualified for Medicaid coverage, but they live in Republican-run states that closed the door to them.
Because Kentucky did take the cash, 308,000 poor people are now eligible for health insurance in the Bluegrass State. Over the 11 months leading up to the election, McConnell and other Republicans opposing Medicaid expansion will be hard-pressed to explain why they want to take health insurance away from needy constituents who belong to their own party.
Click here for the full piece.
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Dec 10, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET Everybody has at least 603 thoughts or memories or reflections or random thoughts or nonsensical ramblings in them that they can write about. It’s a fact. You may think you don’t, like I did once. But you are wrong. Trust me. I know. From first hand experience.
About 2 years and 8 months ago, my friend Jonathan Miller asked me to write a biweekly column for his new blog (one column every two weeks). I agreed and wrote the first column for the blog’s launch in March of 2011. It was well received and now it was time to write my next column but I lacked the time or discipline to put together another 1000 word piece.
Jonathan was eager to get that second column and I told him I was working on it…even though I really wasn’t. I was trying to think about something to write about…which is sort of like working on it but not really.
Jonathan reminded me he had offered me no pay for this venture. Just the satisfaction of getting to write (even if no one ever reads it other Jonathan, me and my mom) and I was cheating myself of this personal satisfaction. I naturally felt bad about all the personal satisfaction I was missing out on but mostly felt guilty because I couldn’t think of a second substantive column for Jonathan’s new blog. Jonathan gave me an extension until mid-April and I took full advantage of it using the Derby (which was still 3 weeks away as the reason for not being able to write a second column). I convinced Jonathan that after Derby had passed my mind would clear and a second column would be forthcoming ASAP, even though I don’t even bet on horses.
By June, a month after Derby had come and gone, I told Jonathan …..something. I don’t even remember what. But I told him I was still working on my second column and just needed a little more time. In July I pointed out it was summer vacation. Not for me but for my kids. And that it would may be August before the second piece would be fully ready.
With school starting in September, I had to ask for another extension for my second column. It had now been 6 months and I was 12 columns behind. Jonathan’s wonderful and very wise wife, Lisa, reminded Jonathan that “John is just like this sometimes and for some reason we still like him, more or less, and have for many years.” That seemed to help and bought me a little more time—at least through the end of October, for my big second post. Thanks, Lisa!
With the holiday season approaching it only made sense that I may need a little extra time to put the finishing touches on what I had apparently been working on for nearly 8 months now. And Jonathan patiently agreed.
I have a phrase I like to use in situations like this. And use it often. It goes like this. “If you’ll just give me one more chance, I swear I won’t let you down again. Really. I mean it this time.” And I used it on Jonathan….and bought myself another two weeks.
It was about this time that Jonathan had a brilliant idea. He noted that we were Facebook friends and I had recently posted several silly things just for fun. Jonathan said, “Look, John. I can’t wait another 8 months for you to get me a second column but I have an idea. How about you continue to write these posts on Facebook about whatever you want whenever you want. They can be serious or silly; random or timely; about what you are eating or what you are thinking. It doesn’t matter. Just write. Whatever you feel like writing about. Take a few minutes each day and post it. At the end of each week, I’ll collect a few of them and run them the following week as John Y’s Musings from the Middle on the Recovering Politician blog. What do you think?”
That was around Dec 1st. I asked for two weeks to think about it and finally said, “I can’t think of any more excuses, Jonathan. OK? You got me. But what if I don’t have much more in me to say?”
I don’t remember what Jonathan said. I’m not even sure I asked this question. But I sure did worry about it. Anyway, as it turns out I have already come up with 603. In fact, this is 604. Like most the others, it has my trademark rambling confidently toward no particular destination. At least not a very important one. I thought I would run out of silly random things to say at about 20 posts. Maybe 30….45 at the outside. But I was wrong! And you may be too if you don’t feel you have much to say.
Dig deep. There is a lot of deep thoughts, absurd thoughts, pointless nonsense and seemingly sensible things you have to write that may or may not be important. But write them anyway. Who knows. Maybe a lot more will come pouring out. And it’s not a matter of the more you write the more you’ll teach others. Not at all. But the more you write the more you’ll learn about yourself.
And if you are reading this and asking yourself, “What is the point of all this, John?” If you were expecting a point, I really can’t help you much with that. But don’t feel like reading this entire post was a total waste. Think of it this way. If you read this far you now have something in common with my mother and Jonathan and me. I doubt anyone else read this far. Sorry. But we now have this common bond that the four of us have having read this post. And I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.
But let me ask you this, Would you rather read 602 more of my posts or start coming up with 603 of your own rambling thoughts, ideas, musings, insights or attempts at humor? So…..Go for it! And know the hardest part isn’t writing the 603rd post or 457th post or 123rd post or the 19th post or even the very 1st one. It’s that dang 2nd one. It is a bear! Trust me. And may take up to 8 months to finish it. But if you can get past that second one, you are one your way. And even though, like me, you probably won’t be getting paid anything for it, as Jonathan Miller reminded me, it’s the personal satisfaction that you’ll get. I’m glad I did it And glad Jonathan kept prodding me. Thank you, Jonathan! And Lisa! And I hope you don’t cheat yourself out of the personal satisfaction of your own writing either.
Let ‘er rip!
Just Write It!
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