fighting the world’s fight.
In The Unforgiving Minute, Craig Mullaney talks about his Rhodes Scholar experience. In introducing it, he speaks of ‘a demonstrated passion for “fighting the world’s fight”‘ as one of the criteria for selection. The phrase stuck in my mind. What did it mean to fight the world’s fight? How do you dedicate yourself to this? Is it […]
reading: the unforgiving minute.
I read Joker One and The Unforgiving Minute back-to-back (thanks, Amazon recommendations!) I expected similar books since they are first-person tales from Iraq and Afghanistan. While true, I found them to be of very different quality. While readable, I found that Unforgiving Minute lacked the power and voice of Joker One. Fair or not, I can’t […]
reading joker one.
At one point in 2004-2005 I read a book or two a week. In retrospect, it was a phenomenal time. Some of my earliest memories are of reading soo much. At one point, I remember that my brother and I were so engrossed that our father took our books away from us when we had […]
does twitter improve memory?
Last month I read an article in Wired about a woman who remembers everything. You name a date and she’ll tick off hundreds of events that have happened to her on this date. The publicity eventually attracted Wired. The article reached the new conclusion that the reason she remembers so much is because she has […]
manufacturing customers.
“…the future of business lay in its ability to manufacture customers as well as products.” That’s a quote from an advertising trade publication from the early 1900’s referencing mass production and the shift from scarcity to abundance. It also struck me as what’s often missed about advertising. Advertising has two (simplified) central components: 1) To […]
random end of march thoughts.
Lacking the clarity to focus on a specific topic, I’ll blog the randoms in my head: 1) When I moved to SF, one of the things that I was most stoked about was being surrounded by ridiculously smart, ambitious people. One of those people is Ramit. To compound his already ridiculous awesomeness, he just released […]
facebook, twitter and corners.
Back in the day, around age 10, I went door-to-door selling greeting cards, candy, and other random things from a catalog. We’re talking big money here: I probably made $2 for every item sold. Things were going well until the day I got the newest catalog in the mail and then canvassed my neighborhood. A […]
attention & value.
One of the reasons I love writing is that it makes me form coherent thoughts. This process sometimes ends up changing how I view a topic. My previous post on what we value has ended up being one of those times. We live in a world of insane inattention. For me it started with AIM back […]
what do we value?
What is it that we value? As a society at large, I’ve heard a lot of candidates: We value our environment. We value our children, Education, Progress, Peace, Health, Knowledge, Kindness. All kinds of stuff. I’ve never thought long and hard about this question. Now that I am thinking about it, these are the kind […]
it’s always the same.
Months ago I looked around me at what was going on in the economy and stock market and it literally gave me tightness in my chest. It was hard for me to concentrate on work, or much of anything. Things that I had read about and worried about were coming to life and the pace […]