My PBS is in its fund raising drive and is airing its more popular programs to get money. I caught the tail end of the Deepak Chopra talk on Buddha or new age spirituality or something like that.

He talked about some stuff about how the transcendental you isn’t the “you” you think you are in this moment or something like that way over the head of Ohio John. Then he went on to talk about the 10 keys to happiness. He did this in about 5-10 minutes.

Sorry Deepak fans, but even he can’t pull this off. I can’t remember any of them word for word since they came at us too quickly. They tended towards the generic, like “Be Loving” or “Don’t be Judgmental” or along those lines. They’re interesting topics for speakers because on the one hand they’re common sense but at the same time any one of them can merit an hour long talk on its own. However, when they come one after another in quick succession like this, as Randy Jackson on American Idol says, “It just didn’t work for me, dawg.”

Had I been Deepak, I would’ve literally spent two minutes total just listing out the top 10 and said, “When you buy my set from PBS you’ll get DVD #2 or my book where I’ll drill into each one of these in the detail they deserve.” Or I would’ve cut it entirely. The middle-road of trying to dump the wisdom of the Universe in ten minutes is trying too hard.