First-person video of a bike race finish – can’t believe I never thought to do this (the filming, not the near-crash).

March 2, 2009 - Personal

The Long Now Foundation – Store – Books – great book recommendations from the Long Now Foundation. Love the <10-word reviews; I should try that.

“The gospel is not primarily a set of facts but a way of seeing and a way of being in the world because of God.” – Richard Rohr

YouTube – Are Violent Video Games Preparing Kids For The Apocalypse? – I’m pretty sure this was what Kenneth Boulding was talking about.

“The future will always surprise us, but we must not let it dumbfound us.” – Kenneth Boulding

“The vice president began to tremble with rage. He shouted, ‘The telephone system was destroyed last night and you had better believe it. If you don’t by noon, you’ll be fired.'” – Idealized Design: How Bell Labs Imagined — and Created — the Telephone System of the Future. Great example of prototyping future experiences to inspire innovation.

Leadership and being a good person

I’ve had a little experience leading people now, and it seems to me that despite all the fuss made about it, leadership really comes down to just two things:

1. Know what you’re talking about: widget A, profit margin B.

2. Be “a good person”: honest, kind, generous, compassionate.

We can go to schools to learn the former, and most leadership training concentrates on tactics for effectively conveying it to others. But learning the latter, despite its fundamental nature, is a foggier path. Maybe that’s because it is traditionally the domain of non-PC practices like religion and spiritual training, and thus not emphasized in scientific methods.

I guess my point is that I don’t see business people encouraged to spend a lot of time and effort specifically trying to become honest, kind, generous, and compassionate, and in my experience that’s the thing that makes leaders truly great. When I do see it, it’s amazing. By no means have I mastered this…but it seems like a good way to try.

Commute haiku

Some simple poems from the past few commutes on the bus.

***

The earth wakes

Flesh-tinted bands stretch over

A drop of blue in a clear pool

***

Standing straight

Hands in pockets

Oakland frame store sentinels

***

Child pacing in cold

Trying to shake

Anxiety of the day

***

Ethnic huddles in the city

Small church buildings provide

A respite from the cold

Of living in a place, unknown

***

Ivy creeps over walls

Try to mask

Concrete human chutes

***

Sunlight peeks over hills

All of nature

Stretches to meet it

***

The mind designs

From its past

Soul creations bring new life

Having it all

I spend a lot of my time imagining the ideal state of things in my life–the ideal work schedule, diet, exercise plan, room layout, web browser settings, etc. Most everything in my life goes under this scrutiny on a regular basis. Such is the life of [the Individualist](http://www.lessons4living.com/enneagram4.htm)…

In all these things, I am influenced by the examples I see in people around me–most notably, the ones in the media. The real people showcased on TV and the internet live fascinating lives, full of adventures and changes. They always seem to be exploring the extremes and ideals of every situation–every time I imagine an ideal, I can find someone already living it. The person on tv seem to truly do it all and have it all.

Of course, “the person on tv” is an aggregated example, made from pieces of individual sports stars, entertainers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, business titans, and more. Besides seeing only the newsworthy achievements in their areas of expertise, we don’t get to see how they live the other parts of their lives. “The person on tv” is made from only the best, most extreme parts, of all these people–the VO2 max of Lance Armstrong, the voice of Christina Aguilera, the artistry of Pablo Picasso, the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, etc, ad infinitum.

Yet because my mind stitches together this Frankensteinian ideal, I’m tempted to believe that I can have it all–I can imagine a “life” that does. With an infinite amount of time and an infinite amount of money, one could conceivably live out the ideals for every facet of life.

But I don’t think I’d want to. After all, I’d always prefer some things to others, and choose to continue doing those rather than switch to something less interesting. I notice this even in the basics of life–while I’d be somewhat interested in exploring what a truly clean house would look like, I’d rather explore what a truly exciting bike ride would feel like, every time.

Choosing some things, and excluding others, isn’t a cop-out, or a compromise. It’s the only possible way to live. And the more I am able to simplify and reduce the number of things I idealize, the more I enjoy the ones I do, and it makes the idealization more of an opportunity than a burden. We can’t have it all–no one can. But we can change how we experience the things we have, especially when we first choose the things we really want.