“In fact, have you had teenagers?”
He coughed a bit and looked down at the table. His lips moved wryly as if he were making a decision. Perhaps our relationship had developed to a significant point. Was I about to experience a revelation?
“I have told you about my fencing instructor, and now you want me to tell you whether I have had teenagers,” Finnegan said at last, with his usual attitude of casual good humor. “One by one, you are wresting all my secrets from me, and soon I will no longer be able to luxuriate in the obscurity that I find so restful.”
I snatched at this admission. “But only the English have a fondness for obscurity,” I said. “You told me that yourself. That means you must be English.”
“Did I say only the English?” asked Finnegan. “How careless I am getting.”
CHAPTER EIGHT: Do Many Things Badly, All At Once
I HAD BEEN SPENDING SO MUCH time with Finnegan that I had been neglecting my business. At least, I thought I had. However, when I went into the office one day, I found things humming along pretty well.
Everybody seemed to be in a good mood, and they were plugging away at their jobs—or, in some cases, at new tasks they were tackling.
The staff writer who had taken a shot at the problem of the pages falling out of our books was quite enthusiastic.
I found her desk buried in books about printing processes and glue. She’d been thinking through all sorts of approaches, she said, moving as quickly as possible. And she had begun to isolate the difficulty.
The sales people were doing a brisk business. One of them, I saw, regularly shifted his pitch in midstream—when one selling point didn’t work, he’d move speedily to another. And he was obviously enjoying himself, and transmitting that enjoyment to his customers.
Overall, I noticed a great deal of activity, of hustling, of creative ferment in the office. The energy of the place seemed to have been boosted.
I wanted to get back to Finnegan for his analysis.
But when I next approached him at his table, he was occupied with another client. This was middle-aged man whose face and posture sagged, and whose clothes exhibited signs of sloppiness—an absent button, an unpressed collar, a belt that had missed a loop.
He struck me as a very low-energy person, so I was surprised to hear Finnegan laying down a rapid-fire series of items for him to attend to.
The man left, and I brought this up with Finnegan.
“I believe you are changing your style,” I told him. “You have always seemed so philosophical, but you were firing orders at that man like a gymnastics coach. What, exactly, was going on?”
“So you thought my approach was different, did you?” he asked. “Perhaps it was, slightly. But my advice in this instance was a very minor variation of what I have been propounding all along. It’s true that I may have stepped up my own energy level in an attempt to boost the electricity in this man’s brain, but that was merely an attempt to inspire him by example.”
“So, once again, you were advising him to do things badly?”
“Of course,” Finnegan replied. “You do not need many principles in my world.”
I crowded closer to the table. “Still,” I said, “I am very interested in the variation in this instance. It seems to me that small changes in style can make a big difference in terms of accomplishment, that the way you approach a task is key to how well you do it.”
Instead of responding verbally, Finnegan jumped from his chair, clicked his heels together, and began to perform an Irish jig. His legs pumped vigorously, his hands slapped in rhythm, and his head nodded in time.
The other customers laughed and cheered as he flung his arms outward and spun about, amazingly graceful. Then, his face glowing with perspiration, he dropped back into his chair.
As always, I was trying to figure him out.
“So,” I said. “Does that mean you agree with me?”
“Exactly,” said Finnegan, blotting his forehead with a white linen handkerchief. “We were talking about style, so I felt it might be best to demonstrate its importance, rather than just talking about it.”
“And you were demonstrating something else,” I replied.
“Really?” rejoined Finnegan. “And what might that have been?”
“Energy,” I said. “High energy.”
“You are so good!” Finnegan joked gently, as he tucked away his handkerchief. “And why was I doing that?”
I thumbed my chin. “Well, I believe it had to do with the advice you gave that rather dragged-down looking man. You were trying to raise his energy level. You believed that would be crucial in turning his life around.”
“Correct.”
“But how?”
“A simple, powerful technique,” Finnegan replied.
“Which is?”
“To do lots of things badly, all at once.” Finnegan paused. “The way to jump-start yourself is to leap right in and try lots of things without thinking about them too much. If you are having trouble making friends, smile at everyone you see, and follow up quickly if you get a response. If you are looking for a job, make lots of calls, do lots of interviews, rush around like a madman. If you take too long with projects, start several of them and as soon as one begins to bore you, shift quickly to another. Life is movement, and moving gets things accomplished.”
“That’s what’s happening at my company!” I said, excitedly.
“Really?” said Finnegan. “You must have told your workers the story of the amateur salesman.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “They are acting instinctively, based on my original advice. I’ve never heard the story of the amateur salesman.”
Finnegan grinned. “Well, you are going to hear it now, just in case you run into some workers who need an illustration of how the technique works.”
He settled back and started in:
“Back when such an occupation was much more common, a young man took a job selling sets of encyclopedias door-to-door. On his first day, a wise old salesman briefed him and his fellow new salesmen. A reasonable success rate, he told them, would be selling one set of encyclopedias a day. With that, he sent them out into the neighborhoods.
“At the end of the day, they reassembled and the old salesman asked them what they had done.
“The man two seats to the left of the young man spoke up. ‘I sold two sets of encyclopedias in my first ten stops and knocked off for the day,’ he said. The old salesman nodded.
“Then, bubbling with pride, the man just to the left of the young man reported, “‘I sold four sets of encyclopedias in my first fifteen stops, then I settled back for the rest of the day and went over the strategies that had helped me be so successful!’ The old salesman nodded.
“It was the young man’s turn. He hung his head and said disconsolately, ‘I knocked on one hundred doors, not even stopping for lunch, and didn’t make a single sale. Sorry.’”
“Again, the wise old salesman nodded. For a few moments, he seemed to be thinking. Then, suddenly, he pointed at the first two salesmen and said, “‘You will never succeed in this line, and you might as well quit right now.’”
“He turned to the young man. ‘You, on the other hand, will be a fine salesman. The key, as you figured out, is to knock on many doors. And to keep on knocking.’”
Finnegan paused and leaned back, leaving me to voice the moral of the story.
“Do many things badly, all at once,” I said. “And keep doing them.”
CHAPTER NINE: Take Care, But Not Too Carefully
I ALWAYS ENJOYED A MUFFIN or two when I had my discussions with Finnegan. I was partial to zucchini muffins, but every now and then, I was also tempted by the chocolate-chip variety. There was something to be said for apple-cinnamon, too.
“I certainly admire a man who wears his weight well,” Finnegan said to me one day. “Some men would be upset if they were bulking up as much as you are, but I detect that you see a certain virtue in exercising
all the holes in your belt.”
It was hard for me to reply to him just when he said this, because I had my mouth full. But I came right back as soon as I swallowed.
“So you’re saying I’m getting fat.”
Finnegan waggled a finger at me.
“You are so blunt!” he said. “You must learn subtle ways of expressing yourself, as I have. However, since you raise the issue, it is true that my formerly slim companion has expanded rather frighteningly. How much weight have you put on since we met. Ten pounds, twenty?”
“Who’s keeping track?” I shot back. “I prefer to monitor my weight badly. And I would think that would fit right in with your program.”
Finnegan was greatly amused.
“Now, now. You are becoming my equal at witty back-and-forth, and I cannot have that. I must re-assert my moral authority. Remember: We do things badly only as a means toward doing them well, not as an excuse for sinking into poor physical or psychological shape.”
I pushed back my plate of muffins, one of them half-eaten. But Finnegan, seeing the stress of unsatisfied hunger in my eyes, pushed them back to me.
“Eat, eat,” he said. “Surely you don’t think I am going to counsel you to quit eating ‘cold turkey,’ as you Americans say so vividly.”
Happily, I resumed my breakfast. “I was certainly hoping you wouldn’t,” I said. “But you had me worried for a moment.”
Finnegan made a good-natured gesture of dismissal.
“Oh, heaven forbid that I should worry anyone,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you that I am the one who does the worrying for those under my care?”
“You did tell me that,” I said, sweeping some crumbs from my shirt and reaching for another muffin. “So now you are going to tell me that you will worry about my diet and I don’t have to?”
Finnegan sipped his coffee. “That’s true,” he said. “But that is not the technique for getting you on a healthy diet. To do that, you are going to practice the Distraction Method.”
I leaned back with a sigh of satisfaction. There’s nothing like a few muffins in your stomach to get you in the mood for dieting. You feel relaxed, full, and ready to take on anything.
“All right,” I said. “I’m wide open to being distracted. How are you going to do it?"
Finnegan sighed with exasperation. “As you should know by now, I am not going to do anything. You are going to do it. Helped, of course, by my invaluable guidance.”
“Well, guide, guide!” I said. “But first, why don’t you tell me why my own dieting efforts haven’t worked up to this point. I have tried various diets, but none seem to work.”
Finnegan spread his hands on the table as if he were spreading open a book.
“Yes, here are the various diets you have tried. Let’s see: The One-Egg-A-Day Diet, The Abominable Snowman Diet, The Beverly Hills Real Estate Saleswoman With the Funny Hat Diet. Am I right? There’s a new one every week. I often think they should dispense with the nonsense, write one huge diet book and call it The Best-Selling Diet-Author’s Diet: The Last Diet You—And the Author—Will Ever Need.”
“Very funny,” I said. “And your point is?”
“Simply this,” said Finnegan. “These diets all require you to get enthused about some special regimen—odd foods, or weird combinations of starches and protein and whatever. Now, a world-class dieter could follow these odd and demanding instructions. But an ordinary human finds them mind-numbingly hard.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but you don’t understand the dynamics. People like these diets because they offer hope of a breakthrough. Therefore, they get people’s emotions involved. Dieters get excited, and that enthusiasm helps carry them along, even though the regimens are hard.”
Finnegan was shaking his head. “The enthusiasm carries them for a while, but it inevitably fades. What people really need is a diet they don’t have to pay attention to.”
“You mean they need to diet badly?”
“Not exactly,” said Finnegan. “Though you can put it that way if it helps keep the idea fixed in mind. They simply need to take care, but not too carefully.”
Finnegan was always coming at ideas in an interesting way, but sometimes he could be too subtle. Fortunately, he usually was thinking of a practical principle.
“You mentioned the Distraction Method,” I said. “Is that the key to effective dieting?”
“Yes, it is,” replied Finnegan. “I’m pleased that our intervening discussion did not distract you from the main point.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “You are becoming too fond of word play. Tell me how the Distraction Method works.”
“Very well,” he said. “It is simplicity itself. And it relies on the fact that our culture is so concerned with dieting that all of us know which foods are good for us without consulting any book at all, faddish or not. Lots of fruit and vegetables, cereals, fish—that sort of thing. You are probably more up on this than I am. The challenge is to get these foods into our bodies in place of things that aren’t so good—sweets, red meat, and so on.”
“And we do that by—?”
“By getting the bad foods out of our refrigerators and cupboards, and filling them up with the good foods. Then by distracting ourselves when we are eating.”
Finnegan took my empty muffin plate and set it aside, then resumed.
“Much of our problem with food is that we concentrate on it too much. When we sit down to eat, we focus on the food, and if we are dieting, we focus on the idea that we aren’t getting enough of the foods we crave. Better, then, to eat healthful food while we are doing something else—reading, watching television, working—and are focused on something other than food. If we eat enough when we are distracted, we will be far less likely to be hungry in those moments when nothing occupies our attention.”
“I get it,” I said. “We must eat only when we are distracted.”
Finnegan gave me a look of exasperation.
“Now, is that realistic?” he asked. “Remember the principle of doing well by doing badly: few people can stick to a regimen. We must try our best to eat only when distracted until the habit of eating well begins to form. But we must not be so harsh with ourselves that the occasional lapse throws us into despair.”
I felt abashed. “Can I propose another approach, then?”
“Of course.”
“Take care, but not too carefully.”
Finnegan grinned.
“Now you are getting somewhere.”
CHAPTER TEN: Seek Relationships—It’s Not a Bad Thing
I THOUGHT OF FINNEGAN ONLY as a counselor. That view was so strong that I never expected him to have any other relationship with people.
But one day, just as I entered the shop, I noticed a quite attractive woman leaving his table, slightly flushed, as if she had just told him something intimate.
As I pulled up my chair and arranged my coffee and water cups on the polished surface, I noticed that he, too, was glowing with a warmth even beyond his usual good temper.
I took my time before speaking, sipping carefully as I watched him over the rim of the cup. Finally, I sighed and put the cup down.
“Well, Finnegan,” I said. “You seem to have made a conquest.”
“How do you deduce that?”
“That lovely lady was blushing, and since I doubt you would ever say anything out of the way to a woman, I’m sure that she was doing so because she was interested in you.”
“Do you think so?” said Finnegan, with absolute innocence. “Well, one must be open to all possibilities. Romance is one of the great rewards of life.”
I reached for a spoon and stirred my coffee, though I wasn’t actually mixing anything into it. For a while, I had used sugar, but now I contented myself with stirring. The action distracted me from the fact that I wasn’t adding calories.
“I suppose so,” I said. “Though it is so difficult these days for me to fit romance into my schedule.”
Finnegan s
eemed to draw back.
“Is it now?” he said. “My view is always that romance should infuse one’s schedule—the romance of creativity, of endeavor, and, yes, the romance of relationships. Living life to the fullest must include love. But, strangely enough, these days many leave it out of the equation.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “I’d really like to find a woman to share my life. But it’s just hard to find the right one.”
Finnegan was looking very grave, as if I had presented him with a complex mathematical equation which was going to take some time to work out.
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