Act Now

We need more people like Marc Benioff, willing to act now. A billion dollars is pittance for a government, but an amazing amount of money for a person. It’s more than you can spend in a life, your kids, perhaps even your grandkids. I’d argue that it’s more than one person deserves to spend on themselves or their desires, no matter how they earned it.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

It sucks getting older. There are any number of reminders of that fact on a regular basis as I move through my 40s. A kid in college, the aches and pains from moving my body too quickly, the paunch that I struggle to keep under control, and the most annoying might be having to get up most nights to go to the bathroom when I should be sleeping.
One of the saddest reminders, however, is the all too regular passing of someone we admire, someone we know, someone we love. I haven’t had much death in my life to this point, fortunately. I lost a friend, a former boss, while away at college. A good friend, only slightly older was killed earlier this year. And I lost someone I admired yesterday.
I never met Steve Jobs. Never saw him speak in person, never worked at Apple, and rarely used their computers. However Steve Jobs was one of the few people that I wanted on my “what three people I would invite to dinner” list. Apple has always been a “cool” company to me, one that transcended the engineering efficiency of so many technology companies to build something that you could use, but more importantly, you wanted to use.
The comparison that came to mind this morning as I lay in bed, thoughts churning about both my day and the loss of someone I admired was the same one that Dave Winer wrote about in his memorial post: Frank Lloyd Wright.
The design, the clean, clear lines, the lack of anything extra was both elegant and insanely frustrating at times. However also genius, and reminiscent of not a better way to do things, but of the future.
That’s what Steve Jobs brought with both design and form in the Macintosh, the NeXt, Toy Story, the iPod, the iPhone, the Air, and the iPad.
The future.

Live and enjoy your life

You never know when the end will come. A good friend of mine died a couple weeks ago at the age of 47. He left behind a wife, 4 children, and many friends and extended family. He never saw it coming. In The Last Post, Derek Miller is dead, he knew it was coming, and prepared a post.

We don’t know when the end will come, but it will come. We are all dying, hopefully slowly, but at some point we will move on.

Invest for the future, work to build the life that matters to you, but don’t forget to live along the way and enjoy your short time in this world.

Accepting death, and making a final post, inspired me. I hope I get the chance to walk out of this world in a similar way.

Why

A very interesting talk from TED and Simon Sinek. Worth the 18 minutes.

 

 

I think that this ties in with some of the ideas that Dan Pink has in Drive. You need a purpose, more than just earning money or making a profit.

Saddened by the need for every day

I run every day. As of this writing, I've been running for 280 days continuously, at least a mile every day, running above 5mph. Having that level of commitment, that drive to tackle something every day, even those days when you don't feel up for it, has taught me something. It's made me realize that this is an obsession, but also that it remains on my mind all the time.

It's a part of my day, and I am ready to rearrange things in my life to accommodate it. It hasn't been a huge impact, but it's there, and it dictates some of what I will and won't do. And it takes priority at times.

Today I got my Monday newsletter from the Libertarian party. The theme of the note was that there is no campaign season, and that a politician needs to think about fundraising every day. They can't take a day off, and they gave an example of that. They called for donations, saying that they can't afford to not raise funds all the time.

I'm also on the Obama list, and I also got a call from the Dems that they needed money as well. I must have been dropped from McCain's list since I haven't seen a GOP mailing in some time.

It's sad to think that fund raising is such an important part of US politics. It's a good reason why we should perhaps have some basic requirements for office and then limit the funds that can be spent by candidates, along with ensuring that there is some level of equal media access. I have not idea how to do that, but I'd like to think there's way.

I have hope that there are people out there that really want to make the world better without needing to personally profit themselves.

Passive Influence

I study karate on a regular basis, and over the years I've practiced a number of different martial arts, most of them in fairly strict in the traditions and routines of student behavior. When I started this new school with me son, it was a lot less strict. That was OK with me, I'm older, and it was a new business with a fellow IT worker leaving his job to pursue his dream of a martial arts school.

Old habits die hard, and I was used to bowing before I moved, before/after kata, and at other times, without exception. Most people in the school only bowed when asked (begining or the end of class, when the teacher mentioned it at the start of kata, before partner drills, etc.) However I bowed every time before I moved to change position, line up, keeping with the routine that had been drilled into me at many places.

After about a year, most people were doing the same thing. Our teacher had noticed, and actually called it out one day. I hadn’t really noticed the others since it wasn't something I cared about. I study for myself, and I've tried to pass that belief on to my son. Our instructor did say that I set an example, and he appreciated that.

By living the way I thought was proper, I’d influenced people. I'm not sure what I take from that, but it did make me realize that our actions change change lives, even passively.

Tweeting Before Coffee

It seems like this is shaping up to be a writing/thinking day. I woke up late, about 8, this morning, and with Kendall coming into our room and Tia already using her laptop in bed. I grabbed my laptop, checking on SQLServerCentral to make sure things were working.

While doing so, I checked Twirl to see what was happening in my Twitter-verse. I responded to a few tweets and then posted a "the best part of waking up is coffee in your cup. Need to go make some." Someone then responded with "not out of bed yet?"

A few people went back and forth, and it made me think that I was a  little more motivated for work than I realized.

I came downstairs and found this post on Blogging and intellectual craftsmanship, which seems to fit me. The inability to separate my personal life from my professional one has worked well for me. It's quoted in the post: “the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chosen to join [in this case sociology] do not split their work from their lives. They seem to take both too seriously to allow such dissociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other”. I found the source essay here.

I thought that was very interesting, and it made me stop for a minute. In some ways I am a tiny bit of a sociologist. I read and comment on things, on events, and actions, talking often from the social and human side of things. It's editorializing, but I try to bring more to the link or event with my own thoughts and comments.

And I often draw on my own experiences in order to do so. The separation from my personal life to the professional is thin, sometimes non-existent.

As I finished his essay, thoughts of it still lingering as I moved on with me day, I read an essay that my Mom sent to me called Effort and Understanding: Having It Easy. I'm not sure if this is the original source as I just had the text in email, and it's been repeated a few times around the Internet, but it struck me as well.

I think luck plays a part in success, and it definitely appears that things are easy for some people. What surprised me is when people said that it seemed I had it easy. From my perspective, that’s far from the truth. I’ve worked hard, and I think I have been lucky to have things go my way, but it’s taken hard work.

We build our own world to a large extent. It might be that we have more ups or downs than others, but to a large extent I think it’s our efforts, our understanding of our capabilities, and our acceptance of our achievements that determines how successful we view ourselves.

And I think that our view of ourselves will shine through to others.

When we enjoy what we do, and work at it, to become good, it appears easy on the outside. We appear to be a craftsman that just goes about their daily work.