Instinctively, we follow the path of least resistance (park in the shade, grab the nearest item on the shelves…).
Marketers make it their mission to study this, the same way scientists experiment with reflexive rats in the lab.. Nike even filmed the Standford team, trained barefooted, to see the landing and movement of their feet.
Creatures of habits. Social animal.
Maximum connections: 120, to stay meaningful.
Yet, we are now networked at hockey-stick growth chart. Majority of the world, including what used to be called the Third World, got phones. Can you hear me now!
Mobile payment, mobile banking, mobile TV.
Nomad lifestyle all over again. I blogged about Point A to B.
Louis L’Amour said it best ” the problem with mankind is that we can’t stay put in one place”.
Train and now plane hobos. Air travel used to carry with it social badges: prestige and class (think Pan Am).
The same with the automobile when it first came out. Then the assembly line (yesterdays’ Foxconn) and high-paid manufacturing jobs at Ford, changed all that.
Everything is new, yet nothing is new.
The rich have to (and have always) reinvent the game, find new playground and fence it off to stay exclusive (can you imagine online education for the mass, live streaming from the Ivory Tower of Ivy League schools). It is all happening.
MIT, then Standford. My fair lady, for the world. The rain in Spain doesn’t fall mainly on the plain.
It is common grace (rain on the field of the good and the evil).
Brazil is hosting the next Olympic. Perhaps it is fitting and symbolic that after England, we shift focus to BRIC, with B for Brazil.
Something about growing ethanol down there. About reinventing a country, about female leadership in a vibrant and colourful nation.
Let’s hope that spirit and energy rub off on us, stodgy and austere nations.
I believe our best days have yet been behind us.
We just need to look inward, take an honest inventory and reinvent ourselves. Focus on the essentials and task ourselves with the right things. Ignore the critics. They are always there, taking shots at doers. And above all, believe. We have pulled this off before. Can and will do it again. It’s our good routine. It’s us, intrinsically and uncompromisingly, at our best. As Chris Gardner puts it, “only us can give ourselves legitimacy”. Routine, but earned routine, not forced.
Thang Nguyen 555 