Category — Fringe Thoughts

The most influential communicators are the ones that can boil an idea down to its core and translate it into simple, straightforward language. Here’s a perfect example from Seth Godin:

“Persistence isn’t using the same tactics over and over. That’s just annoying. Persistence is having the same goal over and over.”

Simple. Profound. Right on the money.

I’m a Starbucks fan, but I’m not a die hard. And that’s a subtle, but critical distinction. I realized this morning that I’ll never reach die hard status. Not many people do. It’s reserved for the truly elite - The ones that require a completely different level of all-hands-on-deck customer service that is a joy to watch from the sidelines.

Every Starbucks regular, at one point or another in their quest for 15 minutes of caffeinated heaven, has had the pleasure of witnessing a die-hard order their favorite, ultra-customized coffee cocktail and perhaps broken out in laughter. This morning’s die-hard prize for most obnoxiously detailed order goes to the “Venti Half-Caf Non-Fat Vanilla Latte Extra Hot With Two Pumps of Caramel…no water.”  The entire line heard it and tuned into what was going on because the woman holding the pocket poodle had to repeat it 3 times. The poor girl taking the order had a mini meltdown, and then tried to recover by staring blankly at the cash register buttons in an attempt to try and parse all the information. It was total system overload. I had the biggest smile on my face - it was one of those moments that Julie and I would have appreciated together in gleeful silence. Until you get to the point where you’re ordering drinks that require 2 or 3 Starbucks employees to stop what they’re doing and make an assembly line, sorry, you’re just a regular.

From the hills of Malibu to the Border of Mexico, California is on fire. More than 500, 000 people have been evacuated as of 9am this morning - just to put it in perspective, that’s more people than were displaced in hurricane Katrina. Try to wrap your noodle around that. More than 1200 homes have been destroyed, Qualcomm stadium is packed with people with no where to go, and the hotels have been completely booked for 48 hours everywhere in California. Firefighters need the Santa Ana winds to die down to even begin to start containing the blaze. Julie and I have been extraordinarily lucky - all we have to complain about is that our kitchen smells like a Texas Rib cookoff.

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Last night Julie and I took a gander outside our apartment to try to find out who could possibly be holding the BBQ in our neighborhood that was sprinkling ash all over our kitchen. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a black sky. We’ve been tuned into the news and the radio ever since. Fires, fed by roaring Santa Ana winds are tearing through San Diego county. Check out the NASA picture to the right - even from space, the fires look biblical.

I woke up this morning to a declared state of emergency just north in Del Mar, Carmel Valley and Rancho Bernardo. More than 8 Fires have covered immense ground and the buzz is that the winds are so strong that they may make it all the way to the ocean 15-20 minutes drive north of our house. Thousands of people are being evacuated all over San Diego just north and just south of us. Qualcomm Stadium has been opened for evacuees (sorry, no horses - I never knew that that would be a problem, but there are frequent no animals warnings from every news source). No one is equipped for this. [Read more →]

The best way to measure the influence of any blogger is readership (traffic). Thanks to companies like Feedburner and Alexa, we can measure readership statistics and trends. In fact, displaying RSS and traffic rank stats in a visible place on a blog is one of the best ways to advertise (and measure) the popularity of a site. Some might even argue that it’s a marketing technique that turns a popular blog into a REALLY popular blog overnight, as visitors subscribe in droves just to see what all the fuss is about. I have to admit that I find it totally fascinating in the geekiest possible way that a single person/blogger can develop a readership in the tens of thousands a DAY. Can you imagine 50 to 100 thousand people getting an email or a feed every single time you posted a thought or an idea? It’s difficult, if not impossible, to picture that many people in one physical space paying attention to one person. To put it in perspective, it’s the equivalent of an entire football stadium listening to one person sing the national anthem. Considering that the most popular blogs are posting daily, some of them multiple times a day, the “who’s-paying-attention” figures can be staggering. [Read more →]

I wish more people in the business world would get how they create negative, counterproductive atmospheres when mistakes are made and blame is casually thrown around as a bi-product of scorched-egos. The following short, taken from my recent reading of What Happy People Know - How the New Science of Happiness Can Change Your Life For the Better (pg 174), illustrates clearly why Blame is pointless, especially in a team atmosphere. On the whole, the fact that Blame is rarely, if ever, productive is an important lesson we’d all benefit from…

“Imagine that you’re in a canoe with a friend and there’s a fork in the river. Your friend convinces you to take the channel on the right. Next thing you know, you hear the roar of a waterfall. What do you do?

Do you start yelling at your friend? Of course not! It’s counterproductive. You paddle like hell for shore.

Let’s say you make it. Now do you start screaming? That’s what a lot of people would do. But why?

You’ve paid your tuition — a brush with disaster — so learn the lesson: Blame solves nothing. It’s counterproductive. Irrelevant.”

- Dan Baker, Ph. D, Director of the Life Enhancement Program at Canyon Ranch.

As an African proverb says, “Until lions have their historians, all tales of hunting will glorify the hunter.”

Last night I had a hankering to revisit a book that I read in Grad School called Emotional Intelligence - Why It can Matter more than IQ. For the emotionally aware, it’s a great read, albeit a little tough going given all the neuro-psychology lingo, but it’s pretty damn intriguing. After pulling it out of the pile I’ve made in the hallway to my bedroom, and blowing the dust off the cover that’s accumulated since I’ve moved to San Diego, I opened to the first page and the first line of the book is Aristotle’s Challenge in bold italics…..

ARISTOTLE’S CHALLENGE:
Anyone can become angry - that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - this is not so easy. – Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics.

It hit me just as hard reading it for the 50th time as it did the first. Ponder that for a second. I think you’ll agree that it captures one of life’s greatest challenges elegantly. What makes it so profound is that it’s been a good 2000 years since these words were written and it’s still just as true today as it was the day he wrote it.

If I had one wish, it would be that I could learn at an incredible rate. The fulfillment of that one wish would solve so much, so fast. It would be incredibly gratifying to be able to fly through a dense book in 5 to 10 minutes and retain it all — or consume an entire section of Barnes & Noble in less than a day. I’ve found myself wishing that more and more since I left school. Nowadays, a lot of projects that I take on for fun in my free time — coding a website using a new programming language or learning a new software platform, for example — can literally take months of reading and research just to get to the point where I’m technically proficient or knowledgeable enough to make any headway. Metaphorically speaking, it can be frustrating sometimes to have to crawl before you can run - but it can be so rewarding to take those first few big strides. Which brings me to the main point I wanted to make…

It’s so important to grow up with a positive attitude towards reading, towards school, and especially towards your ability to grow by teaching yourself about the things that interest you the most. I was lucky enough to have parents and mentors growing up who meaningfully stressed the virtue of intellect and academic discourse and the value of reading for personal growth. Many of my peers, especially in early childhood, weren’t as lucky as I was. Fostering the habit of self-teaching and a love of learning is easily one of the most important things a parent, mentor or teacher can do for a child, men-tee or student. More often than not, nowadays, the message that results from mentoring relationships is being delivered improperly at all levels - grades are ends in themselves, the degree is what is important and passing is acceptable if it gets you the certification. Nurturing habits that produce a desire to educate one’s self and entertain new interests is fundamental to living a fulfilling life — The result is an endless spring of inspiration and confidence. Teaching yourself things gives a unique sense of ownership and appreciation for information and it’s sources (especially people) — your command over subject matter becomes even more of a point of individuality and pride. The bottom line is that fostering a habit of self-teaching is more than just “teaching a man how to fish”, it’s “teaching a man to want to teach himself how to fish.” The difference can be powerful over a life time.

What strikes me most about Einstein’s writings (this one in particular) is how very humble he seems. For a man who has been deservedly named the greatest thinker of our time (and arguably of all time) he stresses his individuality in principal only and always makes reference to kinship, his need to give back and his endless dependence on others. I have included an excerpt of Einstein’s essay “The World As I See It” for my readers who are not familiar with Einstein’s writings. It shows, if only briefly, a window in to the soul of a very great, and very gentle human being…

“How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible.

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…

My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality… The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”

Footnote: The text above is only an excerpt of the full text of Albert Einstein’s copyrighted essay, “The World As I See It” . The excerpt above was taken directly from an online exhibit at www.aip.org - The Center for History and Physics.  I have included it here, with a footnote as websites have a tendency to evaporate and I want this blog to retain it’s full text beyond aip.org’s exhibition, who’s links are likely to change. For those of you who wish to read it, Einstein’s essay was originally published in “Forum and Century,” vol. 84, pp. 193-194, the thirteenth in the Forum series, Living Philosophies. It is also included in Living Philosophies (pp. 3-7) New York: Simon Schuster, 1931. For a more recent source, you can also find a copy of it in A. Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, based on Mein Weltbild, edited by Carl Seelig, New York: Bonzana Books, 1954 (pp. 8-11).