Jim Huffman

It’s a maxim in America to say that winners never quit and quitters never win.

Which is a lot of hooey. But it’s something that probably gets repeated a hundred times a day.

The reason I say that this is a dumb way to look at life is because the reality is that instead of never quitting, winners know when to quit.

I’ve written before about how everyone has, at the most, three or four things of crucial importance in their lives. They may not be aware that their lives are ordered by these priorities but they are.

Their priorities will not be mine. And a priority may be something as simple as dressing well or not working too hard, but whatever it is, these things guide our lives.

I’m a huge fan of knowing what’s guiding your life. Our lives are usually better and we get more of what we’re aiming for when we are conscious of those guideposts.

And some things we start, and they’re not congruent with what we want out of life. Sometimes we don’t realize that an activity is not a match until we’re doing it. And that, my friend, may well be the time to quit doing it.

Example: a work situation. People sometimes get a new job and immediately realize it’s a bad fit.

And most of the time, they don’t do the rational thing, which is to leave the job as quickly as they’re able. If you need the money, fine. Stay until you get a new job. Then leave. Explain to your soon-to-be-ex-employer that it didn’t fit. Don’t be a jerk. Give them the normal notice, work hard while you’re there, but leave. Life is too short.

It works for lesser things as well. Reading a book, and it’s not keeping your interest? Put it down. Maybe you’ll come back to it later or maybe not, but for now at least it’s obviously not important. There’s no crime in stopping after chapter two. (At the same time, don’t be lazy. If you’re exploring a topic that’s new to you, it’s going to be hard at first. You may need to plow through until you gain an understanding of the new subject. But that’s a different matter).

Winners do quit because winners know that life is going to have a certain amount of chaff, and getting past that chaff is necessary to get the important stuff done. Make sure you know what’s important to you, try to make your day to day activities match those important things, leave aside those that don’t, and you’ll find that your life gets more focused and better.

“You cannot make a story out of the ordinary lives of ordinary people. Stories are made out of exceptional people, in ordinary circumstances, or ordinary people in exceptional circumstances. The background of ordinary life must be accurate; that is the only restriction laid upon the novelist.”

Alec Waugh, ‘Hot Countries ‘

One of the sadnesses of life is that children sometimes don’t know their parents. Know them in the sense of the little facts of their history, what motivated them, how things came to pass.I started thinking about this a while back. One of my grandmothers grew up in western North Carolina, but then lived in Wilmington (a coastal port) North Carolina for a time, and graduated from high school there. And we don’t know how that move came to be. It was in a time when moving was difficult and not done often and America was still regionalized enough that even moving from one part of a state to another carried more tension than it would now.It’s a small fact but I wish I knew the story behind it. No one in the family knows and the grandmother in question died in 1988.You can help avoid those puzzles for your family and the way to do it is to write your life story. This sounds both more ominous and more cosmic than it is. Very plainly, tell your family the story of your life. You think they know about it, but it’s very likely there are huge swaths of your life they know nothing about. (This is not the time to reveal Big Secrets. If there’s something about your life that your family does not know about, it’s not good to reveal it in writing, especially if they will be reading it after you’re no longer around).No, what you want here are the little things of your life – the things that make you different from others. This isn’t the time to comment on historical events or politics or anything like that. Just tell your family about the little things they would not know. How was your early childhood? What was school like for you? What was your early home like? What foods did you like? You might talk about religious and cultural aspects of your childhood. What were holidays like for you? That sort of thing. Just tell. Don’t censor things because they seem trivial or unimportant. It’s the small things that make up your life. Obviously, I can’t tell you what you should include. The primary advice in writing your story is to include more than you think you should. Tell the story like you’d tell a story to someone who wants to know. Because – guaranteed – there are those who will come after you who will want to know.

Languages and how they work is a startlingly difficult field of study and one where it’s especially easy to make mistakes – especially when we’re dealing with spoken language. Until the invention of audible recording devices, it was impossible to know exactly how an individual or group spoke. We have no real idea of how, say, George Washington actually sounded speaking. On the other hand, for a pivotal figure such as Margaret Thatcher, we have thousands of hours of speeches and interviews available to listen to. In 500 years, Thatcher will still be an object of study, and students of history will be able to listen to her language and study and analyze it.And the further we go back, the less we know about what someone sounded like. At a certain point in history, people started commenting on voice sounds. Washington was said to have a deep voice, while Lincoln’s was said to be high and tinny, but one that carried well in public – a factor that was important for someone speaking to crowds before amplification.But go back much further, and the sounds of voices becomes more murky. Even descriptions of important individuals are either not noted, or seem to be almost tribute descriptions of an imagined sounds, prettying up what was likely not an attractive voice.

There’s something awkward about class reunions.

Class reunions are popular, a gathering together and catch up time, usually for those with whom we graduated from high school or college. People often go to great lengths to impress the others there, and these events have no doubt been the impetus for weight loss, plastic surgery, and wardrobe revamps.

But they’re still awkward. Generally, there’s a few you’ve kept up with over the years – however many those years are. And there’s a slightly larger number whom you’re aware of, and vaguely familiar with what they’re doing.

But the vast majority of the people are often those whom you know nothing about and nothing in common but a slice of ever receding history. They are usually people you had little in common with when you were in school, and a lot less now. Those you were friends with may have remained friends, or not.

But these gatherings usually bring a thousand painful moments of distracted conversations with someone you had nothing in common with then, and certainly nothing now. The chit chat inevitably revolves around classes you might have had together, events that happened in school ten, twenty, or more years before, and when you’ve exhausted those, there’s nothing else there.

Which in one sense is fine. All of us make small talk with strangers, knowing it’s just small talk, and inconsequential. The problem with events such as these is that we painfully sense that we should have something to talk about, and most of us feel guilty that we don’t. Knowing that we’re not really supposed to get into deep discussions, we revert to a weird play, where we are actors in a drama called school, and we become what we were then. Those who were shy or introverted then often drop back into that patterned behavior, no matter how skilled or accomplished or popular they are now. People who were the envy of the rest of the class then often fall back into that pattern for a few hours, even if they’ve done little of consequence since graduation. Writer Paul Theroux described a reunion as being like a strange cult where everyone was the same age.

If you are still in contact with someone, there’s a reason. If you’re still friends, there’s a reason. But if neither of those is true, accept what those hours are going to mean. It’s okay to remember, and it’s okay to catch up with others. But you’re not friends with someone because you went to school with them. And knowing that can free you to enjoy these moments for what they are. And not what someone is necessarily expecting them to be.

Let me cheerfully admit that our terrible, horrible, no good, very bad hotel was at least half my fault.

My wife had made a reservation at a Hilton, but I took offense at the cost: $300 for the one night, and that was 19 years ago! The internet was barely in the Paleozoic era at that point but I decided I could find something better online. And I did. Well, if by “better” you mean “cheaper.”

We essentially had a long layover in London: roughly 36 hours. A night to sleep, and a hurried visit to some sights.

We left Heathrow and took the tube into London and emerged in front of the Paddington Hilton – the place my wife had originally made the $300 reservations. As we trudged up the stairs and headed in the direction of the place I’d picked, one of my kids grumbled, “Who dropped the ball and didn’t book us here?”, as she nodded in the direction of the Hilton. In retrospect, that was kind of ominous.

But I am always cheerful about these matters and pointed out that despite the cold, late autumn drizzle, we were in a beautiful neighborhood, and I was sure the other place would be just as nice. And after a short walk, we found our address. It was a pleasant, yellow/gold painted building with a nice entrance.

We entered the lobby as a departing guest was screaming at the manager, “This was the worst night I’ve ever spent in a hotel in my life!”

I didn’t think this was a particularly good omen but I decided not to pass judgement too quickly. After guest number 1 had walked away, I greeted the manager, gave her my name, and said we had reservations. She scowled at a screen for a moment, before snarling at me, “I cannot honor this reservation at this price.”

I breathed deeply and responded, calmly, but firmly: “Yes, you will. You made the reservation, I have paid for it, and you will honor it.”

She scowled again, and responded, “Well, I can only give it to you for one night,” to which I responded, “As you can see, that’s all I’ve made a reservation for.”

This pleasant interlude ended, we got our keys and went to our rooms. When things like this happen, one usually thinks that the manager was having a bad day, or that things certainly couldn’t get any worse.

Wrong.

As we got off the elevator, we walked down a darkened hallway. Apparently the hotel – maybe to save money? – was not turning lights on in the halls. But even with the romantic shadows, we could see the hall decorations. The insulation hanging from the ceilings was a nice touch.

Still, we found our room. It was large. That was about the best that could be said about it. But it was necessary that it be large, because the room contained four single beds, laid out in a row, like something you’d expect in a movie about an orphanage from a Charles Dickens story.

The bedding was dirty. One of my daughters actually laid out some of her own dirty clothes on the bed too sleep. “At least I know it’s my own dirt,” she said hopefully. The bathroom was small, and as you might have expected, likewise dirty. There were towels laid in a neat stack, but the pale white towels were streaked in a way that made us wonder if they had been used to clean motorcycle wheels. A brown liquid of unknown origin leaked from the ceiling above the toilet.

I had a room down the hall. It was pleasant enough, but so small that it was difficult to walk around the bed. I actually wondered how they had managed to get the bed into the room.

We slept well enough that night and I woke to the sound of garbage trucks doing pickup in the little mews outside of my window. We went down to breakfast and met our first pleasant member of the staff. The waiter was a young man, a recent immigrant from Slovakia. He realized we were Americans and asked where we were from and when we told him North Carolina, he surprised us by saying he had worked one summer on the South Carolina coastal area. “I know this isn’t a nice place,”‘ he said softly, and told us how a Slovak company had recently bought the property.

We trudged to the lobby with our bags and checking out, I was greeted by the previous day’s manager. Cheerful customer service apparently wasn’t part of Slovak hotelier schools. She scowled again when I told her we were checking out. I pointed out that the rooms were dirty and that this was unsatisfactory. She cut me off mid sentence: “No refunds!” I realized further discussion was pointless and we left.

When I travel, I basically want a comfortable place to sleep. I have no desire to be in a posh place. I have no need for a concierge, or for the managers to know my name, or to have chocolates placed on my pillows. I have stayed at a lot of places. I’ve slept at a youth hostel when youth had passed long before. I was in a creepy hotel in southern Mongolia, where the manager was so drunk he could barely stand up.

But The Senator in London was the worst, and it has little competition. I was gravely informed by my wife and children that I had lost my hotel picking privileges after that. But the story of that night’s stay has entered into legend status in our family and it’s talked about even by people who were not there that fateful evening in 2003.

I’m traveling to London this summer. The Senator is no longer operating but if it was, I’d probably give it another try, just for old times sake. Because that’s part of the adventure. And maybe, just maybe, that’s why we travel after all.

Everyone has a bad lodging experience. For those who camp, it might have been a night of driving rain and cold in a tent. Or like my wife and I, it might be a night in a hotel that also had a bunch of young men who had just returned from a military experience and were celebrating. Or it might be a night I remember from childhood. We were staying at someone’s house (maybe family friends? no one remembers). Part of the house’s layout was that to get to the bathroom involved walking through the master bedroom. I woke during the night, needing to urinate, but unable to bring myself to walk through a stranger’s bedroom so i recall suffering until morning light came.

What makes my hotel experience so dreadful was that it was a combination of so many things. It actually felt like someone had planned it, trying to cram as many irritating things as possible into a single night. And done with success.

Some background: our son was doing study abroad in Seville and we flew over to meet him for Thanksgiving week. Seville was great. We flew from Raleigh to London, from London to Madrid, then by train to Seville. A week in the south of Spain was a blast, even if the beautiful hotel where we stayed had a regrettable history: the building where the hotel was located had been, hundreds of years before, homes for Jewish families in that city who had been removed during one of the periodic purges. Naming the hotel ‘Casa de Los Judios’ [House of the Jews] seemed small compensation for having one’s property seized.

Back on the train, we headed for Madrid, and spent a couple of days there, until flying back to London. Which is where the fun began. Because Seville was great and Madrid beautiful. But neither of those cities provided the basis for a hotel so memorable that it has passed into the realm of legend. That happened in London, where we slept a hotel so bad we remember it like it was yesterday, 19 years later.

Next: how we learned that customer service is not taught in some hotel schools.

When I was a kid, our schools gave us what were then called intelligence tests. Designed to find out your IQ. Us kids weren’t supposed to find out the results, but we often did. That information could either be embarrassing (you got the confirmation that you were as dumb as you’d thought you were) or could likewise puff you up if you were designated as what they called “bright.”

We’ve since found that those tests aren’t very helpful. Because a whole lot of factors play into intellectual skill, native smarts being a very minor part of that skill at best.

But there’s another problem with tests of that nature: a huge temptation to coast in academic challenges, imagining that somehow native skills will take care of the problem.

They won’t. There’s a plethora of factors that go into learning something, and you have to take them into account when you need to learn something – especially when it’s a big something, like learning a new language or getting good at a sport, or learning to play chess.

Far better is to approach a new topic with great humility. Humility is not a fake groveling. Humility is actually having a correct assessment of ourselves, our abilities, and what we know and what we don’t.

We know far less about the world than we think we do. Imagine that you’re six years old, and try to envision how you’d learn something then. You’d ask questions. You’d try to learn from someone who is really good at the skill. You’d know that you have a long way to go, but at the same time you’d feel confident that you can and will make this work.

The next time something big comes along, be that six year old. And if something intellectually big hasn’t come along for a while, start looking for a challenge. The older we get, the easier it is to get mentally lazy. Don’t be that person. Learning keeps you mentally and physically nimble, and it keeps you interesting. Starting today – and even a small start helps – can change your life.

Ukraine has become 2022’s Haiti.

In case you’ve been under a rock for the last couple of decades, Haiti was the it thing for white people since the 1970s. Those who felt vaguely guilty tried to assuage their feelings by Doing Something for the Poor and Downtrodden. Since most Haitians have darker skin, this made it easy for the white people to identify the objects of their pity when they made mission trips to that country or packed used shoes to send. People would talk about the country with a tone that combined sadness and condescension, in the way we announce that Aunt Sheila has cancer.

Ukraine is a little more complicated. First, like Haiti, at least 95% of Americans could not identify Ukraine on a map if I held a gun to their heads. Secondly, it’s in Europe, and that’s even further off the radar than a North American country. Finally, we are told about a war there so going there to distribute blankets to those displaced by domestic activity is difficult.

Other than those problems, Ukraine is a full fledged Haiti to white people. These poverts could not put Ukrainian flag colors on their Boomer Facebook pages fast enough. These same people who know nothing about Ukraine’s history have become instant experts, and, taking cues from the room temperature IQ commentators on network TV, are able to hold forth on minutiae of current events in Kiev.

Takeaway? Don’t reduce countries or regions or cities to a convenient trope. The world is an insanely interesting place, and it is seldom simple. Even when terrible things are happening in a place, people there should not be reduced to that factoid. As we speak, there are teens in Ukraine arguing with their parents, couples getting married in Haiti, and a zillion other things. The world is fun. And when this is all over a trip to Ukraine would probably be a blast.

What person do you hate the most?It’s not a complicated question. There is someone (regrettably, for most of us it’s “someones”) that we detest. Hate even. So who is that?Hatred or strong dislike or detesting is a damaging emotion. Not for the one who’s the object of your hatred. Hatred is a corrosive mental poison that damages you. Allowing it room in your mind does immense damage. (And nine times out of ten, you don’t know that person and he doesn’t know you. If the one you hate is some public official, you’re not really hating him: you’re hating a mental image of that person, a sort of cartoon character persona that your mind has put together from stuff you’ve read or videos you’ve seen).But let’s imagine that the object of your hatred is someone you really know. Probably the biggest thing you need to remember is that you are related to that person. Not in some kind of “we’re all one big human family” scenario (which is correct) but in an honest to God, real, live relationship. They’re your cousin. I don’t mean in the way we normally think about cousins (my parent’s sibling’s children) but in a more removed but still very real way: think something like 7th cousin, twice removed. Maybe your great-great grandparents cousin’s great grandchildren. Or something like that. Which is sobering. Walk down a random street in Cairo or Moscow or Chicago, and every person you pass is related to you. How do I know this? Because we are all descendants of two individuals. Every one of the eight billion on the planet today and those who’ve gone before us and those who will come after. (The technical term for this is creationism. We’re all either creationists or we’re racists, but I’ll save that discussion for another day).So tamp down whatever hatred you have. Do it for the one you hate. Do it for yourself. And do it for the world. The world needs less hatred. And the world especially needs more love. If the person you hate is someone you know, reach out. Ask if you can meet for coffee. Get past the awkwardness and do something concrete. I’m not a romantic or gushy person. But I know what hatred does. Don’t let it do that to you.