..................................................."longevity risk."
Monday, February 8, 2021
Here's one risk I am willing to run.........
But till that morning..............................
Janis Joplin........................................................Summertime
Responsibilities..............................
It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs the least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing. The answer to big government is not private freedom, but private responsibility.
Undaunted........................
If artists have the capacity to make work that defies time, it is because instead of trying to force-fit a predetermined idea of the future, they have learned to live productively with ambiguity, to see it as a rich source of discovery and exploration. Instead of trying to reduce complexity, they mine it, undaunted by contradictions and paradoxes. . . . In this, artists have much to teach us about how we ourselves could address the future with imagination and independence. In addition to thinking about what to do, the artist's method suggest that we should think about how to be.
-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
Yep.............................
..............................................................a lot of people are.
Just a head's up......................................
If you’re not paying, you’re the product, not the customer. And sometimes, even if you are paying, the long-term impact of your quest for convenience might not be what you were hoping for.
-Seth Godin, from here
VDH revisits..............................................
..........................................Animal Farm:
Beware, he warns, of the powerful who claim to help the helpless.
One impossible.................................
........................................................................question.
Sunday, February 7, 2021
Lead me.........................
Lead me from dreaming to waking.
Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.
Lead me from intention to attention.
Lead me from what I'm told I am to what I see I am.
Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace
On lurching..........................
In Gettysburg I still feel close to my grandparents, and I still go to these rolling hills for reflection. Yet so much has changed since that time—not just the disappearance of the Stuckey's souvenir shops or the Rexall drugstore on Gettysburg's main square—the fabric of our society today has a different texture than it did in the 1950s: some of it stronger but much of it badly frayed.
Engaging one's deepest self was easier in those days—with long waits between letters and long-distance phone calls deferred until Sunday when the rates were cheaper. Today, tethered to smartphones and transfixed by Twitter and Instagram, we lurch from one demand to another with scarcely a moment to think. Our impulses are reactive, not considered. They are short-term rather than strategic. We have lost our capacity to act in the present while thinking into the future. We are struggling.
-Susan Eisenhower, from her Introduction to How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions
Conversation starters (or maybe stoppers)..............
.............100 more questions that don't get asked.
Important questions............................
........................nobody is asking:
Why aren't there any left-handed catchers in the Major Leagues?
Generosity of spirit...............
The most important thing is love of others. Not necessarily a sugary, let's-all sing-'We-Are-The-World' kind of love, but a stable, meaningful generosity of spirit that enables us to do things for others—those we know and those we don't—because at base level we choose to give of ourselves. . . . So here's my working definition of generosity of spirit: It is the commitment to treat a person with dignity and kindness regardless of how you feel about him or her.
-Mark Sanborn, The Fred Factor
Look.............................
Look beneath the surface: never let a thing's intrinsic quality or worth escape you.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6:3
this huge and unparalleled modern wrong........
My forthcoming work in five volumes, `The Neglect of Cheese in European Literature,' is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it is doubtful whether I shall live to finish it.
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton, as he begins this short essay
Bezos..........................
The initial start-up capital for Amazon.com came primarily from my parents, who invested a large fraction of their life savings in something they didn't understand. They weren't making a bet on Amazon or the concept of a bookstore on the internet. They were making a bet on their son. I told them I thought there was a 70 percent chance they would lose their investment, and they did it anyway. It took more than fifty meetings for me to raise $1 million from investors, and over the course of all those meetings, the most common question was, "What's the internet?"
Unlike many other countries around the world, this great nation we live in supports and does not stigmatize entrepreneurial risk-taking. I walked away from a steady job into a Seattle garage to found my startup, fully understanding it might not work. It feels like just yesterday I was driving the packages to the post office myself, dreaming that one day we might be able to afford a forklift.
Amazon's success was anything but preordained. Investing in Amazon early on was a very risky proposition. From our founding through the end of 2001, our business had accumulated losses of nearly $3 billion, and we did not have a profitable quarter until the fourth quarter of that year. Smart analysts predicted Barnes & Noble would steamroll us, and branded us "Amazon.toast." In 1999, after we'd been in business for nearly five years, Barron's headlined a story about our impending demise "Amazon.bomb." My annual shareholder letter for 2000 started with a one-word sentence" "Ouch."
-Jeff Bezos, Invent & Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos
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