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Even those without apocalyptic tendencies are finding it difficult not to become despondent these days. It seems impossible that the situation in the middle east will not end horribly if it ends at all; half the continent of Africa is AIDS-infected and the other half is either a perpetrator or victim of genocide; the icecaps are melting. It is an especially tough time to be an American: The rest of the world has always hated us, but never before have we not blamed them. To top it off, it looks like we’re soon to be prohibited from bringing iPods and laptops on the plane, for fuck’s sake. I’d rather get blown out of the sky.

To sustain your own happiness, I recommend that you adopt the following strategies.

1. Eat a mango every day. Let me quote from Andrew Weil’s The Marriage of the Sun and Moon.

An Indian I met in Bombay told me that at the height of the season, people lie on the sidewalks with glazed looks of ecstasy as they let ripe mangos drip into their mouths. In his Autobiography of a Yogi, the late Paramahansa Yogananda wrote that it is impossible for a Hindu to conceive of a heaven without mangos. Recently I came across the following exchange between the great Hindu saint, Ramakrishna, and his chief disciple, Narendra:

Narendra: Is there no afterlife? What about punishment for our sins?

Master: Why not enjoy your mangos? What need have you to calculate about the afterlife and what happens then and things like that? Eat your mangoes. You need mangos.

2. Exercise in the morning. Waking up to an alarm is the worst part of the day, and waking up to an alarm that sounds an hour earlier is more painful, but that additional pain is psychological, not real, as the amount of pain you feel on hearing your alarm sound is only loosely correlated with how long you’ve slept. So play mind games with your mind games: focus on how great it is to get out of bed to exercise, which brings joy, rather than getting out of bed to go to work, which brings tribulation. Offer yourself an incentive to rise an hour earlier, such as a mango. After you’ve exercised, the day, no matter what happens, is already a success. Work ends with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, rather than the usual dread that now you’re exhausted and have to go to the gym, which half the time you don’t do because you’re too exhausted, which you then feel guilty about. First thing in the morning is the time for exercise.

3. Make progress on your A tasks. This is my plug for the 43 folders lifestyle. A tasks are projects that, when completed, will offer lasting improvements to your life. Completed B tasks improve your life in the short term, and C tasks do not improve your life at all. The problem is that our to-do lists are filled with C tasks, like paying the electric bill or going grocery shopping. Though we love to check these items off our to-do lists, and we feel so accomplished having checked them off, the evil of C tasks is that the accomplishment we feel is false. C tasks need to get done, but completing them just keeps you from falling behind. Only A and B tasks move you ahead, so put off renewing your driver’s license for writing the next chapter in your novel or looking for a better job, not the other way around.

4. Keep your friends close. Lovers come and go, family is there forever no matter what, but your friends will keep you sustainably happy if you make the effort to keep them close. Keep them in your life – your daily life. That doesn’t mean you have to communicate every day, but you’re in trouble when all you can talk about is the big stuff like milestones, or reminisce about when you were in each other’s daily lives. It turns out that the milestones are the same for everyone, which makes them empty conversation pieces, which is strange because they feel like they should be really important. Satisfying conversations are built on details, the more irrelevant the better. If you haven’t spoken in a while, cover the big stuff in five minutes and spend your time talking about the fabulous curry you just whipped up or what you were thinking about this morning on the subway. Your college friends can stay daily friends through group email. Without any introduction or conclusion, write down what you said to the girl who was standing next to you today at the salad bar and send it to those seven peeps you’ve been meaning to call. Or start a blog and get your friends to read it.

5. Avoid instant messaging. IM is an acceptable medium for dialogue, if you’re a woodpecker. There is something about communicating in acronyms and emoticons that drains the soul.

6. Go out without corrective lenses. All day you wear your contacts or glasses and see clearly. If you make a habit of socializing without them, you will soon come to associate the blurry haze of myopia with the good feelings that accompany flirtation and inebriety. After enough repetition, the simple act of walking out of your apartment with uncorrected vision loosens you up. It’s like the first drink of the evening is on Pavlov.

7. Presort your laundry. Laundry is the paradigmatic C task; therefore, because time is your most valuable resource, you are charged with minimizing time spent doing laundry at all costs. The most obvious approach is to expand your wardrobe in such a way that you can lengthen the interval between laundry days, but if you’re not ready for that investment, an easier strategy is to get another hamper and divide your dirty clothes into whites and colors as you go. Couple this with making sure everything tossed into its proper bin is right side out, and be amazed at how much time you shave off this day-wasting chore.

8. Shower frequently.

9. Balance the ugly with the beautiful. Consumption of current events media is self-reinforcing, because as you learn more of the world’s horrors, the more interested in them you become. For some, this spiral culminates in activism, much to the annoyance of their friends. Most of us won’t end up in this unfortunate state, but because world news makes competing interests seem unimportant, we run the risk of saturating ourselves with misery. Counter this by being mindful of your consumption of news, news commentary, history, and politics; demand equal time spent on media that instead makes you glad to be alive. If you need some suggestions, you can start here, here, here, or here.

Christine writes:

>I wanted to ask you: when you give your
>tPA lecture, are you reading or have you
>pretty much memorized it or are you just
>talking? I got the feeling that the sentence
>structure seemed too well-thought-out to
>be off-the cuff, and you spoke in a very
>measured cadence, like someone reading.
>But at the same time, you seemed well engaged
>with the audience and didn’t noticeably look at
>your notes.

I learned most of what I know about presenting during a one-hour lecture I attended as a second year medical student six years ago. In the first two years, medical students are subjected to an endless stream of presentations at the hands of people who have no training in how to present, namely, doctors. Some of them are good at it, some are horrible. I didn’t think much of what made a good or bad presentation, though, until Dr. Foster gave us his diabetes talk.

Daniel Foster is a diabetes expert, and was the chairman of internal medicine at the time. He waltzed into the auditorium a few minutes late, while 150 of us waited. He grabbed a piece of chalk and wrote something on the blackboard and spoke. Every few minutes, he wrote a word or two on the blackboard. He never stopped speaking, except to ask questions to the audience. He spoke about diabetes the way someone would speak about a recent road trip. 150 pairs of eyes on him, totally engaged. How did he do it? It’s not like diabetes is an exciting subject.

There are two parts to any presentation, content and delivery, and they are equally important. Developing good content requires an appreciation of what your audience is interested in and a mastery of the topic. I won’t say anything more about content, but that’s only because getting people to develop good content is complicated, while improving delivery is straightforward and more interesting. But content is crucial; the problem with getting a degree in writing is that the most important part of writing is something you can’t teach, namely, having something to say.

It’s easy to see how Dr. Foster held our attention when you contrast his lecture with the usual powerpoint presentation, where the presenter reads her slides. When your parents read you to sleep, sometimes you would follow along in the book, and it was stimulating, but that is because you barely knew how to read, so hearing written words vocalized was minor magic. As an adult, hearing someone read causes a reflex boredom response, and hearing someone read words that you can see causes a reflex boredom response so severe that most people will focus their attention on something else (like the folds in their pants) to stop the pain.

The reason that presenters prepare slides full of text, which they proceed to read to the audience, is that reading your slides is the easiest way to get through a presentation. But reading your slides sucks. Stop it.

Ideally, we would be able to present like Dr. Foster, promptless, emphasizing important points as they come up by writing them on the blackboard, but that requires a degree of familiarity with the topic that is really hard to achieve, and most of us won’t get there for most of our presentations because most of us are not experts on most of what we present. What we *can* do is recognize what it is about that approach that makes it so engaging and try to emulate it.

The problem with powerpoint is that it takes the audience’s attention off the presenter and onto the screen, which, when the screen is filled with words, is less interesting than a human face, especially when the human is reading the words on the screen. The key to presenting well is to make sure that when the audience’s attention is on the screen, what is on the screen is more interesting than your face. Fortunately, there’s a lot of stuff out there that is more interesting than your face, in fact, just about anything is more interesting than your face, except words that you’re reading.

Once the text is off of your slides, the challenge is to remember what to say. I learned to do this by delivering wedding speeches. Most speakers at weddings stare at the sheets they’ve prepared and read their speeches, which invokes the reflex boredom response. Better speakers look up every few words, which is better, but they’re still reading. To avoid the reflex boredom response, you can’t read your speech. You can use prompts, like an outline on note card, but sentences coming out of your mouth have to sound spontaneous, which for those of us who aren’t actors means the sentences have to *be* spontaneous. I write a wedding speech out in its entirety, then I read it a few times, and then I make an outline that fits on a note card. Then I practice the recitation from the note card, referring to the speech as needed, you can actually do this in your head, on an airplane, it’s easy. After a couple of iterations, you don’t need the speech. After a couple more iterations, you don’t need the note card.

I do the same thing for my presentations. I write out exactly what I want to say, slide by slide, and then I read it a bunch of times. When I think I’ll know a lot more about what I’m presenting on than my audience, I can either be prompted by the pictures on the slides, or plug pithy prompts into the slides (this of course is why Dr. Foster can be so flippant and therefore so engaging – he knows more about diabetes than anyone). In other cases, I’ll deliver the presentation from an outline. When I’m presenting to people who know more about the topic than I do, I present straight from my “speech,” trying to look up and sound as natural as possible. This allows me to feel safe in that I won’t forget my lines, while keeping the audience interested. As I become a more experienced presenter, I read less and spontaneously say more.

Special mention should be made of whiz-bang features in powerpoint that drop or twirl words onto the screen, allow for special effect transitions, blink, or make noise. These are gimmicks in the lowest sense: they replace content with fluff. I am sure there is an inverse relationship between the concentration of powerpoint gimmicks in a given presentation and the amount of time spent in its preparation.