One Man's View

The Purpose of Life

2009-09-13T08:19:00.000-04:00

The purpose of life is to identify, understand and follow one's true nature and to help others identify, understand and follow theirs.

True Difference

2008-08-07T20:31:00.000-04:00

Remember: It is what you actually do and not simply what you want to do that makes all the difference.

Make Wind Power: Not War

2008-07-13T10:33:00.001-04:00

It is time to harness the energy of the wind and help fuel the economic conditions of the USA.

View my page on PickensPlan

Optimistically Speaking

2008-07-01T18:16:00.003-04:00

I must admit that I am an unwavering optimist. When I look at situations, it is my nature to find a way to succeed and to thwart those that present the opposing view. I will gladly and willingly take their most dire fears and work to find solutions, but I can not join with them in their dark tunnels. That is not my way and never will be my way, because I hate dark tunnels.

The achievement of success starts with the belief that one will succeed. It is not rational or practical to think that success starts with the vision of failure. The way to ensure success is to take all of the possible failures and establish a way to protect oneself (or ones initiative) against them. For each failure potential that you plan or craft a solution for, you can do nothing but become even more adamant concerning your ability to succeed.

Anyone that says that pessimism is a hallmark of good planning should be cast into the dark tunnel of their most dreaded nightmares and only pulled free when they repent for having such an ill advised beginning. Take your fears and concerns and use them as weapons against their occurrence. Take your commitment and use it as a light to illuminate the path to success, taking careful aim at the snipers that attempt to darken your path.

Success is a given if the vision is clear, the team is skilled and the march to the goal is done with one step in front of the other, always keeping sight of the finish line.

Empathy as a Pillar of Leadership

2008-07-01T07:41:00.004-04:00

There are many pillars that hold up the structure defined as leadership, one of which is a strange pillar indeed. When one thinks of leaders, it is often with the sense of setting vision, driving teams, resolving issues and giving inspiring speeches. However one of the most important characteristics of a leader is the ability to practice empathy: taking into account the feelings or thoughts of others.

When a leader defines a vision, they need to make it understandable for the team they are addressing. They can’t use big terms if the collective team has a limited vocabulary, and they can’t speak of advanced technology if they are equally limited in that area. Likewise, they can’t speak in simple terms if the team is advanced in vocabulary, technology or any other aspect where staying simple will reduce respect for the vision as well as the visionary.

When driving teams to reach new levels of achievement, it is crucial that the leader be able to sense the mood of the team and the individuals. It is not the same pep talk that will motivate each individual, so empathy of whom the person is, what they care about, or what you can help them focus on is critical. When pushing the team as a whole, it is vital to know what works for them in combination, as it will be different than what works for each person individually.

To make issues go away, to clear roadblocks takes a very analytical approach that is always spiced with empathy. Issues need champions and the wrong champion for an issue creates another issue. Therefore, it is important to know enough about the issue to choose the right person to solve it. This requires an empathetic eye towards who would meet the requirement of skill, concern and motivation to turn the issue into an opportunity for success.

Lastly, to inspire teams or individuals the leader needs to have empathy that goes deep to the core. To drive people to do mighty things means that you have to allay their fears and replace it with a strong sense of vision. To bring people and teams to a heightened level of accomplishment it is necessary to suspend what works for the leader, what gets him or her up in the morning, and they need to find what will get the team up and keep them going until they are successful.

Leadership without empathy is an empty room with the lights out.

Sympathy versus Action

2008-06-25T11:08:00.003-04:00

In life there are choices we make every moment of every day. One of the choices that can seed a great number of other choices is whether we approach life proactively or reactively. In this vein the choice of seeking sympathy for our failures, issues, or trials versus taking action to learn from our failurs, resolve our issues, overcome our trials is integral to our view of whether we live life or have the events of life control us.

It is virtually impossible to seek sympathy from others and, at the same time, take action to resolve our problems. You can not do both at the same time.

Chosing to take action to resolve problems therefore eliminates the need to seek sympathy since the problem becomes a thing of the past. If a problem can not be solved after you've performed you best efforts to resolve it, then you need to take the experience and learning from that situation and feel comfort in your new found knowledge. Learn from the unresolved problem and consider that learning to be the success you seek. That experience should give you awareness of how to avoid that problem in the future, and in doing so, give you comfort that something good has been achieved from something not so good.

When the question is "Do I seek sympathy from others versus take action?" the answer should always be "Take Action".

Stadium of Angels

2008-04-23T09:49:00.000-04:00

Many years ago, not sure if it was late 80s or early 90s, I had a vision that would later find its way back to me in the most amazing way. At the time I lived in Massachusetts and my two brothers had joined me there over the course of roughly 5 years time. We would often travel back to the upstate region of New York, traveling through Albany, through Little Falls, and on to Herkimer, as well as other towns in the region.

On several occasions, as we traveled west on route 5 through Little Falls, I mentioned to my brothers (whichever ones were with me) that on the west-most edge of Little Falls I had a vision of a very unique stadium for sporting events and concerts. What made this stadium unique was that I saw it being built overtop of route 5 from the hills on the north, spanning the road to the lower field to the south. The fields ran along the West Canada Creek and provided a beautiful setting for additional venues such as scenic restaurants along the water.

This stadium was to be the only one in existence, built in such a manner and people would come from all over to visit the stadium and attend the events held there, parking in the south side parking areas. They would get the thrill of sitting above an active roadway while watching the game or concert as it took place below.

They would kid me about it; ask me "what are you gonna do, build it", etc. And my reply would generally be that I envisioned that someday this stadium would be built, but at the time it was as if it already existed, and we would continue on to Herkimer.

Well this passed with time and the trips stopped and the vision faded, as most visions do.

In 1994 I met Tracy Lee on-line in AOL when I became CEO of an on-line company called the Virtual Office Complex, which never really took off. However the relationship between Tracy and I did, and we began planning how we might someday meet. I would often say that I could envision angels coming into a stadium at night, filling in the open seats, though they remained standing, with each carrying a lit candle.

It was my view that they were coming into the stadium to pray for us, that we would have the opportunity to some day meet. This vision grew stronger as the days passed, and more and more angels flooded the stadium until is shown like a bright star that could be seen from the heavens.

We did meet, in a story that is too long to tell with this one, and I ended up moving to Hawthorne, NY to live with Tracy Lee and her two children Keith and Chelsea. One day, a month or so after I moved in, we were out for a walk, and I told her the story of the crazy vision I had during my travels through Little Falls with my brothers. She looked at me as if she had seen an angel standing behind me.

I asked her what was wrong and she proceeded to tell me a story that occurred around the same time as my vision story. It was during a trip with her previous husband and Keith and Chelsea as they were returning back from Lake George, north of Albany. As they reached the NY Thruway, Tracy said that she wanted to go west to a small city called Little Falls. When asked "why go there?" she said because she wanted to bring her husband and her son to a baseball stadium that was the most unique stadium anyone has ever built. They were baseball fans and she thought they would be excited.

Laughter filled the car, because they knew there wasn't a stadium in Little Falls and they were as serious as Tracy Lee was in her thinking that there was one. She won the argument and they went west on the Thruway to the obscure city of Little Falls. Tracy spent an hour driving all over the city looking feverously for this unique, famous stadium, but to no avail. There was no stadium and there was only laughter greeting her on the long drive home to Hawthorne.

This story was confirmed by Keith when we finished out walk, who remembered it like it was yesterday. "We thought she was crazy, looking for a stadium in Little Falls."

Was there a stadium or was it a vision shared by only two people who would one day meet. Crazier things have happened, but this one happened to us - invoked by something supernatural. Maybe the angels were beginning to fill in this unique stadium long before I saw them. Just maybe.

Diving in Head First

2008-04-02T08:11:00.002-04:00

Yup, that's right. At the ripe young age of 11 I started diving off heights that are considered by many to be insane. At the age of 12 I took my first dive off of Butts Bridge in Herkimer, NY. A mere 45 feet from the bridge's cement railing to the 15 feet of water below. It required that you curve your body once you entered the water or you would sink your hands and head into the muck of the bottom of the West Canada Creek.

This might seem less nuts, but the problem I had was that I wear glasses because I am near-sighted. That means that I can't see anything at a distance. So ... when I'm preparing to dive from 10, 40 or 70 feet, I can't see the details of where I'm diving. To make up for this physical challenge I would drop a rock or stick or pebble and time how long it took to hit the water. That would show me how long I was to keep my dive before I brought my hands above my head to break the water upon entry.

If I didn't break the surface of the water correctly, then I would break my neck at heights of 50+ feet. I would lock my left hand around my right wrist and, depending on the hardness of the water or the height of the dive, my arms would get ripped along my body because of the intense impact.

Diving takes skill to know whether to do a swan dive (arms out to the sides with an arched back) versus a jack-knife (holding my ankles) as I dropped to the water below. In each dive style it was necessary to bring my arms into a locked position just before hitting the water. Luckily I'm a born drummer, so timing was never an issue.

I remember one time I was attempting a dive, at Trenton Falls, NY (1st hole) that required that I clear roughly 10 feet of cliff rock to make it to the water about 30 feet below. Everyone said I was crazy, but I just hooked my sneakers to the edge of the ledge I was on and used every bit of body strength I had to push off in hopes of clearing the rocks. To add a little distance to my dive I did a jack-knife so that my legs were further into the dive than if I did a swan. I missed the cliffs with about 5 inches to spare and made the dive. Needless to say, I didn't see the need to prove that one twice.

Another crazy dive was at the Train Bridge in Herkimer, NY where the river was usually on 5 feet deep near the abutment that we would jump off the 28 foot bridge into. We wore sneakers because as soon as you hit the water you were making hard contact with the rocks and had to push off to bounce back up into a standing position. When it rained this water got to about 7 feet deep with a massive current that brought the muddy water slamming against the bridge structure, making these near perfect, but insane conditions to dive off the bridge.

To dive into this small (2 foot wide) slot you had to move several railing poles to the right, on the bridge above to get the correct angle. Then I would dive into the water in a racing dive (sort of) and make sure that my hands were in front so I could push off the rock bottom to keep from smashing my head and becoming a West Canada Creek floater. That's one dive that took a lot of skill and confidence to do without ending up in the hospital or the morgue.

The reason I'm relaying this is because these dives took skill and confidence. We weren't crazy. We never drank or did anything to blur the mind so we could stay focused. The one thing this taught me was that if you combine skill and confidence you could achieve the most amazing things. I have used this same approach throughout my many years in the software industry.

I don't take on a project or start a company unless I know that I have the right team/skill. And it is through that team and the vision I develop of what we're doing that makes/keeps me confident that we will be successful - and to date we have always been able to achieve what others have thought was an act of a crazy person.

Enough said on that topic.

Some notes on China

2008-03-30T12:30:00.001-04:00

China has close to 1.5 billion people. They could have remained isolated forever because their population is capable of buying all that they produce with a market that is half that of the earth. However they ran out of raw materials so they had to open trade. Once they opened trade, they opened visibility to/from within China to the outside world. By doing that they created desire by those inside to want what was available to others in other countries. To keep domestic turmoil and uprisings to a minimum, they allowed other countries to sell their goods in China, and in doing so "keep the children happy".

I saw kids, no older than 10 standing on the side of 4 lane highways with their bikes waiting until it was safe to cross. Not sure that safe is a word I would use since traffic in all lanes appeared to be continuous. This is a common way that kids and adults will cross these massive roadways in mainland China.

Though this is a communist country, you wouldn't know it from the way that commerce is flowing on every street corner. Businesses seem to have free reign on how they package and deliver goods. I suspect that there are freedoms that don't exist, but in the day-to-day lives of the Chinese, as one said "you don't miss what you've never had" and I'm not sure I can see what freedoms they don't have for the everyday citizen.

Negotiation is a way of life in China. I was with a business partner at an ancient temple (build on 12 AD) and they were selling things at the gift shop. I was interested in a set of lion figures and they sold for 350 RMB (roughly 50 USD). I went to pull out my credit card to pay and he told me to put it away. He then proceeded to negotiate the price down to 150 RMB and the lady seemed fine with the sale. That's over 50% off and she did the deal like it was list price.

The horn is a favorite instrument of all taxi drivers. With scooters, other cars, trucks and people littering the streets, the blowing of the horn is the accepted way of clearing a path through the maze.

I took a taxi/limo from Forshan to Guangzhou airport and I don't remember seeing any unpopulated landscapes. That was roughly 100 kilometers and there were buildings everywhere, like NYC on a conveyor belt. It's almost impossible to comprehend how many people are living in China. As we travel, there are thousands of massive apartment buildings wherever you look. Ducked below their skyline are businesses that must find a way of employing all these people, but it is just so hard to imagine that for every apartment I see there is a job someone that duplicates the space that is required to house all these people. Where do they all go and how have they been able to so efficiently exist without utter chaos as the standard norm.

They say that English is a required language, but I would say that the vast majority of Chinese either never learned it or they never practiced it so it was soon lost from their memories. I have met many business professionals that say that when they are in grade school that they are encouraged to choose an alternate name that will be recognized internationally. I know an Eric, a Leo and a Julian and expect there is a story behind each choice, but I never asked. I probably should have. Maybe next time.

As an update to this topic, while in a restaurant at the airport I struggled to ask for a specific (chicken) dinner or a Coke (so much for international name recognition) when I noted a table with a set teenagers. I asked if any spoke English and 2 quickly came to my rescue. This either means that my opinion of lost memory is correct of older people, or it is only recent that the requirement to learn English is new to the schools of China.

There was a sign above the highway that said, in Chinese and English, "No driving with fatigue". For some reason I suspect that saying you fell asleep at the wheel may show how communists punish those who don't obey the rules. Very much like the head of the Ministry of Commerce (I think) was executed when it was found out that he accepted bribes and let defective/poisonous goods be exported from China. No lengthy trial. Just executed and then "on with the show". Now that's accountability. I don't think that will be a common occurrence in China’s government.

I would suspect that the every day Chinese person doesn't notice they live in a communist country. The ones who notice are those that the government fears and needs to silence. The analogy that comes to mind is that of a car. If the steering wheel or bucket seat told the engine that it wanted to propel the car, the engine would consider it a useless request and either stop running to show the steering wheel that its mission is to steer the car and that it can't run it, or show the bucket seat that it’s there for rider comfort and has no business trying to trade places. If that doesn't work, then the car gets rid of the steering wheel or bucket seat and gets a new one. In democracy we allow the steering wheel to try to power the car, similar to George Bush running our government.

Families seem to have a high degree of closeness and no problems expressing it. Small children tend to be "worked by the parents" in a way that is like working dough for a loaf of bread of a pizza. They seem to flow with the mood of the child and, like water over a rock, the child just come back to good behavior. I think our culture breeds discipline, while the Chinese culture breeds acceptance, and that permeates their very existence.

Endless

2007-09-17T20:05:00.000-04:00

A drip, a drop
To never stop
And never know its end.

A drip, a drop
On my forehead
My mind adrift I trend.

If I was old
And not so fit
My life, it soon would fail

But being not so
So on it goes
Drip, drop on down the trail.

One man's hole is another man's sphere of influence

2006-09-03T20:50:00.001-04:00

I would like to request that the term Black Hole be replaced with Black Sphere. By calling them Black Holes, individuals consider that there is a place where one goes after entering it - likened to the black hole that Bugs Bunny jumps into when he's trying to escape Elmer Fudd.

The reality is that these are Black Spheres that have no top or bottom. They draw matter into them without bias, from all directions. They can not be entered with a space ship to transfer human passengers to visit their past.

Once a piece of matter or a spaceship is drawn onto the surface of a Black Sphere, it is consumed as matterless particles with minimal energy being released to signify the immediate destruction.

These are not Black Holes, but rather Black Spheres that consume everything around them. They are due the respect that they deserve and should not be contorted into something that represents the escape hatch of Bugs Bunny.

Meaning of life

2005-10-07T09:31:00.000-04:00

The meaning of life is to gain understanding in as many positive forms as possible through our direct experiences and to not hinder others from doing the same. This understanding is then brought home (spiritually speaking) to enable the overall pool of understanding to be enriched. The final results of this spiritual (collective) pool is to enable God to have a partner worthy of its fellowship.

The first portion is self explanatory in that we only truly understand things through our experience rather through sharing of our experiences. For example, you can't truly know what sharing love is like unless you experience it.

The second portion of the reason for life "to not keep others from doing the same" sets the stage for all of the "rules" that require us to not cause others pain or negative experience, whether that be through stealing, murder, adultery, etc... Though negative experiences are a part of life due to being with others that are not serving the true meaning of life, it is not the reason that we exist.

Whether it is possible that a given person (spiritual form) lives more than one physical life is not thwarted by this reason for life - since gained understanding in the spiritual sense may not be something that one can bring from one physical life to another - though many feel that they "are aware of things" that they couldn't possibly have encountered in their current lives. This is either because they have lived before or because they have access to the spiritual pool in some form, even in their physical state.

On Quitting

2005-06-17T00:01:00.000-04:00

"Giving up starts with the first excuse."

Einsteins in the Gutter

2005-02-20T12:05:00.000-05:00

Einsteins in the Gutter: This tag line means that there are people in positions of servitude of others, as well as humility, poverty and destitution that have skills, greatness potential and intellect that is far beyond what anyone that "knows" them can even imagine.
All people have potential, and some may thoroughly surprise you.

Statements of general interest

2004-09-11T22:05:00.000-04:00

The atom bomb is nothing more than a well positioned stick of dynamite.

This statement is meant to remind us that the amount of impact that something can have is not always limited to what one may originally think. By taking dynamite and using it to split an atom, you get the blast impact thousands of time its original potential.

Time is of the essence

2004-08-13T00:08:00.000-04:00

Time is of the essence