The Socratic Scribbler On Life Planning…FROM ARISTOTLE TO PANTYHOSE

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Last time we talked about how making a proper to-do list requires that we first create a plan to change our lives for the better. This plan can then become the basis of motivating to-do lists, day after day. To make this life plan, we start by asking ourselves some tough Socratic Questions. These questions are the same ones I had to ask all the time during my thirty some years in advertising. To develop our business and creative plans for the wares we were peddling, we put the prospective customers on the couch and asked….

• Where’s your life right now? How has it changed in the past year? For the better? Worse? What caused these changes?
• Where do you want to take your life? What would make you happy now? Five years from now?
• What changes need to happen for you to achieve that happiness?
• Which of these changes are actually in your control or within your power. What are the realistic choices and actions that you can actually take?
• What actions do you need to take to make those changes? In what order?
• What resources or help do you need to take those actions?
• How will you know that your actions will be effective? What will be different?
• What is your Plan B, if your actions fail?

After gathering the answers, we then attempted to figure out where the product or service that we were peddling might fit into our audience’s life. For instance, how do the answers to these questions influence the way you chew gum, your selection of toilet bowl cleaner, the car you want to buy….

These questions can seem overwhelming. The problem is that asking how well your life is working for you now and how you want to change it covers way too much territory. You may be happy with your job but hate your romantic life. You may be happy with your health but unhappy with your appearance. If I break up with my girlfriend, does that mean I’m going to chew more gum?Here, again, is where we want to follow Aristotle’s advice and recognize that our happiness depends upon the fulfillment of our desires. And, Aristotle noted that our desires actually can be organized into a manageable list.

According to Aristotle, we all desire good things for

• Our mind…pleasure and utility of learning and knowing new things that can enrich our lives
• Our physical and mental health
• Our physical appearance and attractiveness
• Our personality..self confidence, likability, ambition
• Our virtues: courage, prudence, wisdom, justice, magnanimity…our vices…gluttony, lust, envy….
• Our family — parents, children, spouse, extended family
• Our friends — past and present
• Romance — love and sex
• Our work, job, business, vocation…how we spend our time to support ourselves and others
• Our network of colleagues and resources
• Our finances and wealth
• Our home
• Our rest and relaxation
• Time and information management
• Access to technology
• Our community — neighborhood, city, state, nation, the world
• Transportation — so we can go the places we need or want
• Our knowledge and skills
• Our affiliations, clubs, charities, political commitments
• Our social status
• Our spiritual life

Depending on your stage in life, your philosophy, and your own dreams, you may add some things to the list by enlarging one of the topics… like romance or work as you look for a new mate or job. Also, at different stages in life, different items are more or less important. Romance can be a big deal from high school into your twenties, where health and wealth get very important when you retire.

This checklist is also reasonably manageable… around twenty items. When you go for your annual physical, the doctors have a longer checklist list which they manage get through in an hour or so. An airplane pilot has an even longer checklist before he takes off. (Or, so we hope) Note also, that the importance of various items on a doctor’s checklist will be also driven by your stage in life. Now, imagine going through Aristotle’s list of goods and asking our Socratic questions about how you are doing in each of these areas of human desire. Are you satisfied with your social status? Do you have the knowledge and skills you need to achieve the wealth you want to secure? Are you likable? The list demands that you make some choices and rankings. It forces you to confront your strengths and your weaknesses.

The amazing result of doing this exercise is that you really can get a feel for how happy you are and where you think you need to make some changes. Your list also needs to include what is going on in the world. Which trends or events in the world are working to your benefit and which are not? If you are in Texas you may see your property value increase; if you are in Illinois, maybe you should move to Florida for lower taxes.

Imagine you follow the the sage advice of Ryan Holiday, Nicholas Luhrman, and your high school English teacher and use a stack of index cards, slips of paper, or a sortable computer program to make some twenty master lists for yourself. Let’s pretend we are using old fashioned index cards.

On the first index card, you would write Health and then answer the question of how you are doing and what needs to change. On the next card, you might write Romance and then write down how you are doing and why. “Women avoid me because I’m fat.” Being fat may also appear on your Health card. Looks like an area you want to address for some kind of change. You may decide you like being fat. Well, then, you need to become a happy fat fellow, attractive in many other ways. Perk up your wardrobe and personality. Get rich. While you may never win romance with someone seriously adverse to your hefty size, others will find that your weighty wallet more than compensates. Yet, your doctor may come into play, saying…’I don’t care if you did get a pretty girlfriend, if you keep packing on the pounds I promise you’ll be dead at forty.” Well now, you will need to re-evaluate. As you do this exercise, you will have many interesting conversations with yourself…in the Socratic Way.

Once you do this master exercise, then you can turn your insights into a real plan of action with a specific list of projects to accomplish. Now you will make your master list…the projects that you set for yourself in each area, from painting your kitchen to sending a birthday present to an old friend.

I confess that I developed this way of evaluating situations for my work as a strategic planner in advertising. I did this in my twenties, with ideas I stole from Aristotle. (By the way, my study of Aristotle proved much more useful to my work progress than any business book I ever read) For each client, I filled out my index cards for each important area in a checklist I developed for my work. These checklists would, in turn, lead to my specific projects for each brand. I would review my project list every day, and ta da, a proper to do list for the day would magically emerge. On my desk, I had an index card for every project, usually about thirty going on, with a scheduled checklist of actions. I would thumb through them quickly each evening, and make a list for the next day.

This part was not as easy as it sounds. With all those projects we have in life, which should we do first? Which should we spend most of our time on? This is the dilemma the efficiency experts call Urgency versus Importance. Some things just get important because they are urgent, like hustling to the bathroom. But if we keep running after urgencies, when do we get those big, important things done. How do we turn a million things into Jack Palance’s ONE THING?

Arisototle has a trick that we advertising people call “laddering.” That means trying to figure out which desires make the most difference overall.

The campaign for Hanes Panty Hose is a classic case. Hanes had successfully introduced L’eggs in a clever, fun egg shaped package back 1969 to fit the happy, sexy mood of the the 70s as baby boom women entered the labor market. L’eggs were priced lower than ladies hosiery and distributed in drug stores rather than department stores. Women loved them. At the same time, Hanes management knew that music and fashion change and that there was an opening in the market for a more premium pantyhose. Some women were advancing in their careers. They were putting aside their mini skirts and wanted to look more stylish with padded shoulders and big hair. That means they were ready to spend more money. Hanes now had to figure out how their new Hanes pantyhose could be worth more. They had sold L’eggs on the notion of fit…”Our L’eggs fit your legs”…a real issue and problem at the time, and the egg shaped package reinforced that idea in a suggestive feminine way. Now, how to sell the Hanes flagship brand?

I’m now telling the story as it was presented to me at a luncheon many years ago by someone who worked on the campaign. Apparently, their team worked with Maslow’s version of Aristotle’s goods…his pyramid of needs and wants, starting at the bottom with the physical security of food and shelter, moving up to sensual pleasure, moving still higher practical function, moving up to cost, convenience, and performance, still higher to romance, to social position, to self power and actualization. Working your way up the pyramid was called “laddering” a product and service’s benefits. Aristotle called it inclusiveness or necessary conditions, meaning you can’t get one thing until you have the other. It’s difficult to worry about the taste of your food if you don’t have shelter; and, if you are a gourmet, odds are you have a few bucks or a lot of cooking skill or both.

So, Hanes knew that L’eggs already owned fit and even fun in pantyhose. They also knew that women who bought more premium fashion tended to be more stylish. But what did that mean? Why do people wear pantyhose…to show off their legs…why…for sexual appeal…why…to beckon a temporary or permanent partner. Now, if you go too high up the ladder, you lose credibility. Telling women that if they wear Hanes pantyhose that they will soon be hearing wedding bells strains everyone’s credibility. However, telling people that their legs will be noticed people they want to notice …well…that simple idea lead to the highly successful campaign “Gentlemen prefer Hanes” which showed women being noticed by men by showing a shapely leg.” The campaign boomed with success. However, even in the eighties, this began to be seen as sexist by feminists…women’s worth dependent on a gentleman’s preferences…and was dumped. A costly dump…the brand never recovered. Fortunately, the pantyhose craze was almost over anyway and business dress was becoming more casual. Welcome yoga pants.

The point of this story is the value of laddering in helping us focus a long list to key ideas and actions. When you have a big list of changes you want to make in your life, you have decide which change you need to make first…your big idea…which will have the most positive impact on your life and even move your other desires forward. This is really just a re-statement of the old Pareto 80/20 rule, that twenty percent of actions create 80% of the results.

So, as you go through those thirty lists, that pile of index cards…you want to put them in order of importance. That’s why you use cards…so you can shuffle them around. Which things have the most impact on your other card lists? For instance, if you win a new client, that brings in more money to hire more people, so you can service your current clients better. Also, seeking new clients will make you hyperaware of what clients really want. So, paradoxically, the best way to serve your current clients may well be to seek new ones! That would not occur to you without a method something like this.

After lots of success with this question and answer method, I saw that this Aristotelian way of working was bigger than just another nifty Getting Things Done clerical tool. It proved to be a practical way to plan every aspect of my life, not just business. It doesn’t just tell me to make lists. It tells me what to think about and what choices I need to make. Once a quarter, I would review all the areas in my life and set the key changes and actions I wanted to make in the next three months. That generated another twenty or so cards for my personal life projects, from planning a family vacation or writing a wedding toast for my daughter. This doesn’t just make your life more efficient and effective; it makes it happier because you are actually doing what you want.

I also used a version of this system to plan and make notes for all my reading and knowledge projects. Indeed, when I interview highly successful people, I find that most people ladder up to their spiritual life to inform just about everything else, something a lot of people might find surprising. Well perhaps not Plato or Arisotle or Marcus Aurelius. But that’s a topic for another Scribbler. Better jot that down on my Scribbler project index card. Now, where did I put it?