“Sailing and life in general is dangerous. Teenagers drive cars. Does that mean teenagers shouldn’t drive a car?” Laurence Sunderland told the AP. “I think people [...]]]> Abby Sunderland’s father, Laurence Sunderland had a great response to the criticism that it was far too dangerous to allow a 16-year-old to sail around the world by herself:

“Sailing and life in general is dangerous. Teenagers drive cars. Does that mean teenagers shouldn’t drive a car?” Laurence Sunderland told the AP. “I think people who hold that opinion have lost their zeal for life. They’re living in a cotton-wool tunnel to make everything safe.”

Read the AP article

Our good friend, Laurie Grimshaw Cox, commissioned Leslie Killinger to create this painting as the symbol of the Dhanyata Life Center. And even though the Dhanyata Life Center is no longer in existence, this painting still is, so I wanted to share it with you.

Dr. Leo Kim will be speaking along with Mark Maxon. There will also be a question and answer [...]]]> Dr Leo Kim, Author of “Healing The Rift: Bridging The Gap Between Science And Spirituality” will be speaking at the University of Utah Orson Spencer Hall on MY BIRTHDAY,  Saturday, May 23, 2009 from 10:00am to 2:00pm

Dr. Leo Kim will be speaking along with Mark Maxon. There will also be a question and answer segment.

This event is FREE to the public!

Here’s where it will be:

University of Utah
Orson Spencer Hall (OSH) Building
200 South Central Campus Dr.
Salt Lake City, UT 84112

Here’s the itinerary:
10:00am to 10:45am: Mark Maxon speaks
10:45am to 11:45am: Dr. Leo Kim speaks
12:00pm to 1:15pm: Question and Answer session with Dr. Leo Kim and Mark Maxon
1:15pm to 2:00pm: Book signing with Dr. Leo Kim and Mark Maxon

Dr. Kim’s appearance is being sponsored by: The Anniversary Inn, K-Talk Radio, LifeWorks Int’l, The Maxon Show

Here are directions:

Go east on 100 South until you reach Central Campus Dr. Turn right (south) onto Central Campus Drive and follow the windy road forward until you reach the pay-lot directly east of the student union. Orson Spencer Hall is directly south of the Ray Olpin Student Union, and the auditorium is inside of the east doors.

From the book, Methods of Discovery, I found an interesting anecdote. “Daniel Chambliss wrote a paper called the “Mundanity of Excellence.”  He spent five years studying competitive swimming.  He coached from the local to the national levels, interviewed [...]]]> Russell Fisher sent me the following and I liked it so much that I’m posting it here:

From the book, Methods of Discovery, I found an interesting anecdote.
“Daniel Chambliss wrote a paper called the “Mundanity of Excellence.”  He spent five years studying competitive swimming.  He coached from the local to the national levels, interviewed dozens of swimmers, and traveled with the best teams in the country.  His core research problem was to discover the nature of “talent” and “excellence” in swimming.  His central conclusion was that talent was a complete fabrication, a meaningless construction designed to cover and romanticize what he called “the mundanity of
excellence”:

“Superb performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habits and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole.
There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions:
only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produced excellence.”

Great champions are people who work on the details and make sure they do all of them right all of the time.  Their motivations were also “mundane.”  They didn’t aim to win the Olympics as much as to polish up their backstroke next week, improve their sleep habits over the next month, and eat more carefully.  In short, their goals were nearby, not far off.  Indeed, Chambliss argued, the great champions try to turn the big meets into mundane occasions by making every single day a big meat, winning every single race in practice.  The big ones then meant nothing more than the others.” Abbott, Andrew. Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences.  New York, 2004. page 189-190.  (Actual paper citation is: Chambliss, D. F. 1989. “The Mundanity of Excellence.” Sociological Theory 10:103-105.)