If You Spend Hours Watching Cable News, You Are Just A Political Hobbyist

Partly as a result of 24/7 cable news and its unending political coverage, politics today is simply another form of entertainment. A spectator sport at best.

We know the names of all the players. Nate silver homogenizes sports and election statistics as if we all had political bookies. We’re angry and we want purity tests for our candidates.

What we’ve lost sight of in all of this is what politics is actually for. It is, at its core, only about the wielding of power to accomplish something. Success comes not from shouting, or self-righteousness, or the sanctity of one’s views, but from the ability to muster the requisite number of votes.

This is true whether it’s about pre-existing conditions and guns or about filling a pothole or paving a road in your community.

Political science professor Eitan Hersh explains this in Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change.

The Power of "Microresolutions"

Everyday most of us battle our own demons. These Demons often prevent us from doing perhaps the hardest thing there is, that is initiating and adapting to personal change.

With the New Year, I’m sure we’ve all made resolutions. By now most are long forgotten. Change is hard. Personal change is even harder. One wonders how anyone ever does it.

Perhaps we can do it by a kind of personal mental jujitsu that manipulates the force of our resistance to change, against itself. This might work a lot better than confronting it with sheer force of will. And what if we did this in small incremental steps? It just might be that in that situation, resistance will give way to success.

It is in these “Microresolutions” that Caroline Arnold has found the sweet spot of change. She details it in Small Move, Big Change: Using Microresolutions to Transform Your Life Permanently.

My conversation with Caroline L. Arnold: