Well, this is a neat idea!

Mike Gathright, a professional acquaintance, is now 8 months into a yearlong (or more, or less) sabbatical that involves traveling around the world with his family.

The photos are beautiful and the gang looks happy.  What a fun trip, especially during these times.

Let us live, albeit briefly and vicariously, through his amazing photo album and blog at www.3amtraveling.blogspot.com

We all -- each and every single one of us -- present.

Just as we all sell and negotiate each and every day.  Life is one long dialogue about what to do, with whom, and in the context of finite resources...be they time, money, attention, energy, effort, etc.

When I am asked for recommendations on Presentation Skills, I always recommend http://www.presentationzen.com/. 

And I do so again today.

Presentation Zen is a crisp, clean, clear blog rife with countless book recommendations, videos, checklists, and other wonderful resources.

Enjoy and, if it benefits you, please share it with others.

I usually restrain myself from sharing recommendations pocked with four letter words, the second of which is the only vowel.

But I stumbled across http://gapingvoid.com/books/ last week, bought the book at B&N, and read it last night.

It's hilarious and, though sometimes blue, full of great career advice for the 'creative thinker' or 'entrepreneur.'

i.e., You.

I spoke with the kindest man last week.  Mid-sixties.

Regarding his vocation, he commented, "I have finally found my sandbox."  And his eyes twinkled and his grin beamed.

Wow, yes.  Our sandbox...  That which we are called to do.

Remember..."vocation" -- from the Latin "vocāre" -- to be called.

May we each find our sandbox and, ideally, before the final straightaway of life's run.

I think this is really inspiring, beautiful, haunting, heartbreaking, overwhelming, and personally convicting: http://emichrysalis.co.uk/players/sigurros/unicef_photostream/ 

Count your blessings, pray, and work tirelessly each and every day to make this world a more tolerable place.

-------------- 

Peter said to him, "We have left everything to follow you!"

"I tell you the truth," Jesus replied, "no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—and with them, persecutions) and in the age to come, eternal life.  But many who are first will be last, and the last first."

Mark 10:28-31

"I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace.  In this world you will have trouble.  But take heart!  I have overcome the world."

John 16:33

595,000 small businesses closed in 2008.¹

2,500,000 jobs were lost within small businesses in 2008.²

Americans' net worth increased $2 Trillion in Q2 2009 due to increasing stock prices.³

And Southwest Airlines has announced they are discontinuing lemons.  Literally.  No more lemons in any in-flight drinks.  This will save them approximately $100,000 in the next twelve months.⁴   (I remember American Airlines removed one olive from every first-class salad...way back in the 90s...and it saved them $42,000/year.)   

As has been the case for a year-and-a-half, there continues to be sobering news, the periodic ray of hope, and examples that show the macro-consequences of micro-movements.

^1&2Source: Small Business Administration

^3&4Source: ABC News

It's been raining for days in North Texas.  We get rain here, but rarely like this.  Everything feels cool to the touch, moist, and downright soggy, from my shoes in the closet to the oversaturated yards across the street.

One of the interesting byproducts of such rain is the mushrooms.  They are growing everywhere.  Here are a few from our neighbor's house:

The mushrooms remind me of a story.  Several years ago, I found myself a thousand feet below the earth's surface, working with colleagues and interviewing several miners about their employer.  I asked an innocent question: "How clear is your organization's vision?" 

"Wow," a miner shouted back, standing knee-deep in an echoey ink-black cave...water dripping from the 'ceiling,' his headlight beaming me in the eyes, "that's a joke, right?  They treat us like mushrooms around here."

"Mushrooms?" I asked.  "What do you mean, 'mushrooms?'"

"They keep us in the dark and feed us sh_t."

"Ah, mushrooms.  Got it."

And away he picked.

Note to self and all leaders: Do not treat people like mushrooms. 

Fertilize, cultivate, and nurture people, yes.  But equally important, communicate, give 'em plenty of air, and let the light shine in.

On last night's SHARKtank, an entrepreneur named "Cactus Jack" (aka Jack Barringer from Ames, Iowa) pitched his "push-up machine."  (See 'Week 5, Episode 105.')

Nothing revelatory about the device, of course.

But he made a comment that I've heard in less memorable ways.  As he put it, "The one lesson my daddy taught me that I still remember: 'You can trade hours for dollars or ideas for millions.'"

You go, C.J.  Move those machines.

The world, of course, only goes 'round via both.  We need brain surgeons to create new ideas, but we also need brain surgeons to operate.  The equation doesn't work without a numerator and a denominator.

But I got a real kick out of Cactus, and I thought you might, too.

Yesterday, Blockbuster announced they're likely to close 20% of their stores...approximately 960 in total.

They intend to install 10,000 kiosks (like Redbox) around the country.

Call me an idiot, but I think this is one of the worst ideas I've heard in recent memory.

If one wanted to revolutionize transportation at the turn of the 20th Century but insisted on keeping the horse...Henry Ford and countless others would have kept us in the stone age.  But no, they realized there was a better way.  And it wasn't ponies.

Kiosks are more of the same.

Hulu, Netflix, even public libraries understand this.  Now that's saying something.

The answer, Blockbuster, is not to perpetuate infrastructure.  After all, Redbox already has over 15,000 kiosks.  Why try to out-amazon Amazon or out-wal-mart Wal-Mart?  No, no, no.  That isn't the way forward.

The way forward is to envision where the market is GOING and then BE THERE when it arrives.

Think online, download, cloud computing, Kindle, iPhone apps...anything, please, other than more 'boxes on streetcorners.'

We don't need a better record, 8-track, cassette, or dvd.  Au contraire.  What we need is a more seamless, frictionless, infrastructure-lite pull-thru delivery paradigm that keeps us coming back for more...without getting out of the car, swiping a credit card, or carrying a box to and fro.

What we need is what the FTP was to the five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy.

Bring it.  Please.  And then some.

Here's a fun article about Gen-Y and reading (or not) non-verbals. 

Gen-Y Johnny.pdf (168.09 kb)

Someone I respect shared it with me and, so, I share it with you.  Also because it references the late, great Ed Hall, one of America's premier anthropologists.

Enjoy.

At long last, I have finally escaped from and exorcised the 770 pages of Cheever: A Life by biographer Blake Bailey (based upon Cheever's 4,300 page journal which spanned multiple volumes and nearly five decades of reflection).¹

Upon completing the 1977 manuscript of what would become his most successful novel, Falconer, Cheever wrote, "I think the work is successful and that I may be rich and famous.  I claim not to care.  I can always scythe my fields and walk in the streets.  It is the strangeness of this excitement that I must examine.  Why should it seem so strange to succeed?  I do not mean pride or hubris.  I mean only to have solved most of my problems and to have exploited, to the best of my intelligence, my raw materials."

We should all be so lucky as to find use for our raw materials.

And yet, although Cheever did indeed achieve sobriety in his final years, "Rarely has a gifted and creative life seemed sadder," wrote peer John Updike after the publishing of The Journals of John Cheever, nine years after Cheever's death.

Cheever's 'lostness' for so long, coupled with the interpersonal destruction that accompanied his alcoholism is staggering. 

A Cheever friend reflected, "He was extraordinarily blessed by anyone's standards -- fame, wealth, a wonderful wife, great kids who did him proud and loved him, a long and highly successful career, talent, friends, on and on -- but he liked to say all he had in life was an old dog.  There was his despair.  And then there was his inability to comprehend the despair and self-negation he inflicted on others."

Having been consumed by Bailey's authorized biography in the nooks and crannies of many plane flights and otherwise wasted moments in boarding areas, I have completed the book with much relief.  Cheever's is a difficult life to inhabit, even temporarily and only intellectually and from beyond the veils of time and space.  His was a life in which brilliance was tempered and metered by such depression, addiction, and self-destructive narcissim that one cannot help but wonder, "What if?"

Posthmously, Cheever was described by Dave Eggers as "some kind of freakish winged book-writing angel beast."  Undoubtedly, his writing was periodically otherworldly and often breathtaking.

Yet his life serves, in my opinion, more as a cautionary tale than something to be desired or envied. 

After all, at what cost giftedness?

¹See August 10, 2009 entry.