This week I finished:

Lesson Plan: The Story of the Third Wave, directed by Philip Neel and David Jeffery: If you’ve followed my pursuit to learn about the pattern of how people are induced to act against their values by culture around them—also known as corruption—you’ll recognize the subject of this movie. It’s about high school history teacher Ron Jones, who in 1967, when his students asked how Germans could become Nazis, threw some experiential teaching their way.

He started teaching them strength through discipline, unity, and community. They inadvertently fell into Nazi youth-like behavior.

I recently watched the made-for-TV special The Wave I had seen as a kid and the German movie Die Welle, plus tons of interviews and documentaries. This movie, Lesson Plan, seems like the quintessential documentary. It was created with students in the original experiment. It features them, Jones, and people from the German movie. It showed Jones returning to the high school, which had spurned him so that his return there in the movie was his first in about forty years.

Not counting seeing the The Wave as a kid, my path to this field began with Philip Zimbardo’s book The Lucifer Effect. I forget what put me on to that book. Edith Egar’s book The Choice referred to him, or maybe just that she knew him. Anyway, the more I learn about corruption, the more I see the pattern’s huge role in America and the world today.

Useful Not True, by podcast guest Derek Sivers: Derek made his books all free for a week so I picked them all up and am making my way through. I like this one the most so far. It’s about mental models. It describes their effects and how you can use them.

He illustrates how they work and tells you what to do. It complements unit three of my book, Leadership Step by Step. My book gives basic exercises to practice like scales for piano or dribbling exercises for basketball. I’m partial to mine, since I prefer learning how to lead to reading leadership appreciation, but I know more people prefer to read the latter than to practice exercises.

How to Live: 27 Conflicting Answers and One Weird Conclusion, by Derek Sivers: This book gives lots of advice, designed to sound useful while at the same time contradictory. I didn’t find it useful, though I notice it got many glowing reviews online.

Overall, I find Derek’s material designed for young men with entrepreneurial dreams. I hadn’t thought of it while in the middle of this book, but since I just wrote how How to Live overlapped with unit 3 of Leadership Step by Step this book overlaps with my book Initiative, which also gives the basics to practice to create the life you want, or would want if you knew what you wanted. Most people hide their greatest passions from their conscious awareness, because our greatest passions are our greatest vulnerabilities, and my book helps them surface their greatest passions.

La Grande Illusion, by Jean Renoir: I watched this movie again for the first time in years to refresh my thoughts of what I considered one of the greatest, in particular for its subtlety despite war situation.

I was prompted to watch it after Brighter Summer Day and Tokyo Story and their subtlety, nuance, complexity, and universality despite ordinariness of subjects. While watching was thinking it paled in comparison, but after reflecting, it doesn’t lose anything in the comparison.

This movie keeps making me think, a sign of great art. Plus it came fifty years earlier. Though I don’t study film, I understand that it broke new ground in ways and direction people might not have known possible. Even the title adds serious meaning.

A subtle few moments that caught my attention. In a war movie, one of the main battles is a snowball fight. Rittmeister von Rauffenstein’s reaction on hearing a machine gun used to attack Captain de Boëldieu, which I read as him seeing as beneath them. His cutting the geranium was a major point of the movie, like the scene with the guy in the dress, so you could say wasn’t subtle, but it conveyed meaning beyond what I’d expect. Lieutenant Maréchal unable to connect with Boëldieu, the latter unable to drop his formality, or honor, depending on your perspective. There is only one woman with a significant role, but it’s so important, the female presence pervades the movie. They are what the men are fighting for.

Each act could be its own movie, any one of which could be a masterpiece. Any of these relationships are significant, telling of human experience, of life:

• Different people of different backgrounds from the same country
• Aristocrats with each other
• Aristocrats versus plebeians
• Man and woman
• Woman with lost men
• Two men on journey
• Man in war
• Any one of the characters on their own facing challenges in life

• ← My first time doing a NY Times crossword puzzle
• Simple math humor →