Amidst the Tiger uproar here’s an angle i haven’t heard. It may seem harsh (uncrik) at one level by pointing out someone’s failing but I think it leads to a broader point…

Earl Wood’s was famously quoted as saying, “I told Tiger, you will never meet anyone as mentally tough as you. And he never has, and he never will…” As Tiger ascended the throne of achievement with his seemingly unsurpassed determination and focus, I found myself admiring that very quality his father had insisted upon. It was, in fact, easy to fall into believing he had a capacity I did not and could only daydream about possessing due to that singular attitude. He believed his father, it seemed, to the point of making it true. He was mentally tougher than anyone.

The story that has swept through his life now is not one simply of infidelity or lust or even ego. It is a warning story to all would be fathers. Earl Woods lied to his son. With the well intended purpose of ensuring his son’s success in the world of sports, but without the balance to accompany the reality outside of sports. The truth is Tiger Woods would constantly meet people mentally tougher than he is – if he spent any of his life away from the golf course or the yes man/woman world around him Mental toughness is measured by many more things than the line of a putt under pressure. By not being taught that truth he failed to learn one simple virtue: humility.

What is revealed from the scope and scheming of his sexual lifestyle is not that he was cheating or enjoyed sex; that would hardly distinguish him at all, but that he believed he could manipulate anyone to conform to his demands. That his wife was simply a navigable obstacle to his wants, even to the last day. That the press could always be cajoled – when caught two years earlier he didn’t change his habits afterward because he believed he could always get out of it. That no woman would ever make public their indiscretion because he was Tiger and he had made it clear. Because in the end no one would ever stand up to him. Because he believed that no one was as mentally tough as him, so as long as he was clear with what he wanted, he would get it.

Now he learns a lesson that could have been taught at a much earlier age: The attitude it takes to win is different than the attitude it takes to live.

While athletics teach us many values, too often athletes acquire only those values. Killing It as an athlete is knowing the difference.

Holy Moly! Most people I know are so busy thinking about the things they do do, they don’t imagine the millions of things they don’t do. Think about it, you could spend whole days coming up with lists of things you’ve never done or ever will do!

Ever think about how the time people spend online is time spent reading, but not reading books? Ever ponder the dwindling profits of book publishers? The general diminishing of the american attention span – tuned now for status updates but not novels. I’ve always been a book lover, but I’m also prepared to see human beings tell stories and information through other means that eventually leave books behind. Is there not a scenario in which the purpose of books would be entirely encompassed by some other format(s)? 2 or 3 generations down the road, do you think there will still be a lot of “book lovers”? Big change is nothing to lament, just another opportunity to kill it and move ahead!

If there’s any consensus about Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace prize last week, it’s that the award was given somewhat prematurely, perhaps in an effort to strengthen the presidents resolve on the tough road ahead. Whatever the case may be, many in the media are outraged, including the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol who said somewhat disdainfully, “I mean, President Obama and I have done about the same amount to bring about world peace.”

Obama receives another award

So what do you call it when an award is given before a person has done anything to deserve it? I call it skipping the middle-man. In some respects, awards have a very practical function – acknowledging success is a way to ensure more success is generated. And in an era where the legitimacy of even the most accomplished among us is thrown into question by everything from a gender test to a drunk Kanye West swiping your microphone, maybe it’s time we rethink how we look at awards. If Obama doesn’t deserve the prize he was given, then in some ways we were all in the running. I say we should accept this as a fact and move ahead. We might miss out on gaining a hero to look up to, but if we all strive a bit harder to make the cut next time the Nobel Peace Prize is handed out, there might be a lot more actual peace in the world.

As we trudge through our day-to-day problems, it sometimes helps to remember that there are magical places in the world.  One worth contemplating is a mountain commune for dwarves only in Kunming, Southern China. There, you can see 120 miniature, elf-like people going about their real lives in fairy tale clothing, and living in mushroom shaped houses that they built for themselves. In contrast to the isolated Shangri-La’s or Madagascar’s of the past, however, this earthly paradise is developed out in the open, vulnerable to the political and economic challenges of mainstream life.  This group of dwarves voluntarily segregated themselves into this commune because they faced constant discrimination from tall people. They quickly developed a cash cow livelihood for the entire community when they began to charge tourists an entry fee to observe the 4’3” or shorter residents in their self-designed story-book community, complete with their own functioning police force and fire brigade.

Fairy tales in real life

While some may denounce the theme park motif as being similar to an exploitative situation, shouldn’t we pause and ask ourselves a couple of things.  First, isn’t it a different thing altogether when a group voluntarily (even happily) decides to monetize some aspect of its own novel condition?  Isn’t the widely popular NBA just a freak show of tall, strong people?  Isn’t the fashion industry just a freak show of well-proportioned people? Why shouldn’t dwarves organize and demand compensation for what makes them unique?! I even go so far as to say this particular theme park is superior to professional sports and the fashion industry, because instead of creating beauty from what is already desirable, these bold dwarves are creating something desirable out of what society looks down upon (literally!)  Killing it is knowing that our own personal utopia will not just appear, but that, it if comes at all, it may be because we’re facing so many problems that utopia is the only way out.

In just 5 short years, the number of people on facebook is approaching the size of the total U.S. population. Type in any of the approximatly 250 million names of facebook users and you’ll likely get a photograph and a country/city where they live. For some, the “current city” information on facebook means so little that it remains unchanged for years after the individual moves on. For others, a particular city carries so much meaning and nostalgia that they keep the name of, for example, their birthplace or where they went to college, even after they have left the place behind. Between sentiment and indifference – there are those who just want accuracy.  Some residents of Kashmir, a disputed territory between India and Pakistan, are upset because facebook only allows them to choose India as their country. Tensions that have long existed on the physical borders between countries have now emerged in cyberspace.

So where do we really live when many of the activities once associated with life in a particular city have shifted to the Internet? I have more friends on facebook than I have in my current city, New York, and I do much of my shopping online. Additionally, while I still get a portion of my news from the online version of my hometown paper, The New York Times, the vast majority of the news I consume comes from a unique batch of ever-changing, worldwide sources. I like the legendary artist and architect Vito Acconci’s take in the video below. Instead of fretting over the loss of the “hometown” as it was 50 years ago, we should re-define what a city means.  This is our chance to manifest our fantasies, make the world into a new creation. Though our physical community is less and less a place where we find a mate, start a business or go to school, maybe it can be appreciated as a unique place where the intersection of virtual and real reality are actually experienced together – an enriched junction where flash mobs, celebrity sightings, and elaborate hoaxes are possible.  While the once mysterious cyberspace is becoming a common location for our more mundane tasks, actual reality is becoming a more exciting, creative space than it’s ever been, even if it means getting comfortable with our new “homelessness.” And that’s Killin’ It!

Today I read about a group of French workers who, in an attempt to raise money and gain attention to keep their jobs at a heating factory, decided to pose nude in a calendar. In this tough economy, with many stories of people employing all kinds of measures to make ends meet, up to even selling their own kidney, you might just look at this story from Chaffoteaux factory as only another desperate extreme. In most cases, society will tell us that selling the body is equal to cheapening the body. This contrasts with how selling of our time, brainpower and freedom is both expected and respected. We place a different standard of value on our physical being then on the part of us that thinks and feels.

Whether you think this is right or not, the problem arises in a situation where you’ve lost a job and the value of your work is assessed at zero. Most people will feel essentially worthless when the job skills they’ve banked on are no longer bringing pay. Above and beyond the old saying “at least you have your health” we can feel a great sense of worth and balance by finding creative ways to mine the value in our bodies. Don’t just take my word for it, for more proof just consider the most looked up to members of our society, the star athletes and models.

We’re all made of about $1’s worth of minerals like chlorine, sodium, oxygen etc. The millions upon millions of ways these materials are combined gives us the vast array of body types that can be seen in the human species. While there are some opportunities to capitalize on combinations of these minerals that results in beauty or strength, most of our bodily attributes are underutilized, which often leaves their value overlooked. When the job market makes us feel like we’re not worth so much, doesn’t it make sense to mine value, namely entertainment value, from our bodies?  Posing nude is one thing, but you need only go so far as to make a youtube video of yourself touching your tongue to your nose, maybe enter a hotdog eating contest or try to break a Guinness book record for the fastest run over 100 meters of ice (there’s a record for that.) Presenting your body in a way that makes use of its unique qualities is a creative investment that can give a balancing boost to your sense of self worth. And that’s Killin’ It!

If someone asked you to describe what outer space was like, you’d probably say dark, big with some scattered twinkles. For most of us it seems not much of the “space” in our brains reserved for imagining a richer version of the world beyond the earth’s atmosphere. The astronauts who’ve been there say the sounds are surprising and the scent is both indescribable and unforgettable.  Most of us indulge in some sort of fantasy life, how much of it is based on other past experiences and how much is truly creative?

I believe the best way to have new experiences in reality is to have new experiences in your fantasy life. In your daydreaming, the question should not only be a choice between Morocco and DeLorean or Hawaii and speedboat, but also pin-ball gravity and ladybug feet versus black light sun and polar bear grass. By inventing new sensations within our fantasy scenarios, we’ll be able to discover the uncharted feelings and emotions that exist unrecognized in our lives. For example, the closest thing scientists have been able to come to reproduce something like the smell of space is a combo between melting metal and a hotdog. Have you ever imagined inhabiting a place with such a smell while experiencing zero gravity? Killin it is knowing that there’s an infinite number of experiences available if you just invent the map to find them.

Everyone will get a kick out of this clever site that scans your face and tells you what celebrity you look like.  You’ll feel yourself killin’ it when you try this.  Go there:

http://celebrity.myheritage.com/celebrity-face-recognition

Do it.  Read on!

Your face is basically like your own advertisement, but how do you know if the right message is coming across?  The truth is that, with the Internet and life available to us online, it’s getting easier to accept a multitude of personas for one person.   Paradoxically, a multi-faceted inner life often gets stuck in an unchanging exterior package.  It’s as if you’re required to sell hot sauce in the same bottle you once used to sell lemonade.  You may get someone to buy one or the other, but probably nobody is going to be buying both.  Short of regular visits to the plastic surgeon, what’s a person to do?   I’d say there’s a lot to be learned from our most visible members of society, our superstar actors and actresses.   Matt Damon can pull off an overweight, middle-aged snitch in one movie and a sexy hero in another – and all with the same face.   This is exactly why I love this online program that tells you what celebrity you look like.  My results tell me that, like Chuck Norris, Kevin Costner, or Benjamin Netanyahu, my face could belong to a bearded martial arts wiz, an aging romantic, or the one time head strong prime minister of Israel.  There’s no question that our face bears heavily on how others deal with us socially.  Learning how to use yours to the maximum potential- like good actors do -  is killin’ it.

This  clip of Andy Kaufman on an old Letterman show singing Slim Pickens’ Rosemarie is the total essence of killin’ it.  Here comes the wacky comedian, dressed in a diaper with a turban and a fake mustache…what’s he gonna do to make us laugh?  He’s gonna sing a totally heartfelt, sincere, beautiful rendition of the song…no catch.  You gotta love it, a gesture like this.  One part hilarious, one part utterly sincere. The expectation of comedy rewarded with the power of a genuine singing performance.  Andy shows us that the way he looks and the way he acts need not have a thing to do with one another.  That alone is killin’ it.  Total deadpan, a magic moment.  I’m holding Andy Kaufman up high in the ranks of the retro killin’ it hall of fame.