Tag: Colonel Sanders

Human spirit as Motivator

Papillon is a real-life recount of  an undefeated spirit. Viktor Frankl talks about “they can take my body but not the spirit that is in me”.

In war, down the trenches, with bullets zipping by, what causes a man to stay put?

No greater love than a man who lays down his life for a friend. Comradeship.

Mike Murphy, a SEAL, a Penn Stater, went out in the clear for better wireless signals, knowingly sacrificed his life to save his troop.

Human spirits.

Higher purpose.

Maslow perhaps touched on this by naming it “self-actualization“.

In War and Peace, we read about the Russian army defended Motherland after Napoleon had burned down Moscow.

Wounded bodies, but not spirits.

United Flight 93 passengers decided in split seconds to go down in style.

In 300, the movie, their leader retorts that (when aides brought up bad news that the enemies’ arrows would rain down and cover the sky) “good, we will fight in the shade then”.

Human spirits.

Each man’s history tends to condense in those few decisive turns.

Shun not the confluence of events.

In crisis, show confidence and judgement. When it’s 50-50 split, throw in the human spirit. The tie-breaker.

The quant could never factor this quality on their spread sheets.

They aren’t trained to identify much less put a dollar value on it.

But since time began, we know it exists. One more (aerobic) step, one more cold call (Colonel Sanders), one more pregnancy unaborted.

The Vietnamese eat from a common rice pot. There is always one extra bowl and a pair of chopsticks just in case.

I was at RockStorm last night (stadium concert). The other numbers were OK.

But when Noi Vong Tay Lon (Let’s join hands) was up, I heard a loud chorus “the wild is calling us to rejoin disparaged shores”. Old wine in new skins. The spirit of unity expressed in new genre (rock was first associated with individuality and independence).

In Hotel California, we hear that “we haven’t had that spirit since 1969”.

Human spirit.

Tell me it did not exist, too intangible, hard to pin down.

I will tell you history is made of exactly that, whether or not historians could pin it down. That which is unseen is stronger than that which is seen.

How do they know?

Have you ever wondered how some songs deliver just the right emotion? How do they know what’s relevant and resonating? Chicago‘s If You Leave Me Now, for instance.

On these blogs, we often mentioned the eccentric, the peculiar and oddities.

Rarely do we put much effort articulating those feelings and God forbid, meltdown or breakdown (Newtown, Conn).

This job belongs to recording artists.

In Advice to A Young Poet, Rilke was referring to being broken, being vulnerable, as prerequisites for being a poet.

Now, that’s painful.

To achieve authenticity, you to have to live through it. To pay the price (Eric Clapton‘s Tears in Heaven did not come about without his personal loss).

Who would be willing? To lose that much to gain that little? MBA candidates wouldn’t choose that route. (I was asked yesterday what’s the use of these blogs?).

Then, we touted creativity, inventiveness and “out of the box” thinking.

Serial entrepreneurs and lovers have one thing in common: they both tried and tried hard down that path (risk taking).

Without rejection, you wouldn’t get results (think of Marconi and Marie Curie).

Those in Sales know without Cold Calling, there wouldn’t be enough rejection to fill the sales funnel. Seth Godin wrote a bunch of unknown books before he got a hit (Linchpin). Colonel Sanders almost gave up as retirement was nearing.

It’s the numbers game. The Beatles logged in 10,000 hours bouncing around from Hamburg to Liverpool to become who they were.

To close : How do they know? They don’t.

They tried and failed. Then try again. Until they got it just right. It hit the spot . Think of Stephen Bishop‘s It Might Be You.

Maybe it’s you. “Wondering how they met and what makes it last”. Keep trying. Don’t give up on us, baby. It must be you. One-hit wonder is OK. As long as it’s the Whiter Shade of Pale.

Try until it’s right. How do I know? I am still trying. It’s only my 900th blog.

Besides perspiration

Hard work is a given, a prereq for success. But that necessary spark, the 10% inspiration, must be there.

Two candidates, with  equal experience, the one with a great attitude wins. You must have the mojo.

It shows up in conversation, in off-hand moments (kicking the dog on the way out or giving the finger in the driveway to the one who ends up interviewing you).

In the Orient, job interviews often take on a new dimension. 3 finalists. Two walked by the broom that fell on the floor. The third picked it up and thereby, secured the job.

Attitude.

I just learned that Oprah ran the 1994 Marathon. On your way to success, you will have to walk across many “brooms”.

Just pick them up. Get used to removing obstacles. Habits of Effective (and not Deffective) People.

Tell me a success story, I will tell you how many obstacles he/she had to overcome:

– Colonel Sanders almost gave up until his last-ditch effort: a bar owner asked him to toss in more salt which is now the KFC recipe.

– Khan‘s wife offered herself to Silk Road traders to bail her husband out

– Al Gore, accepting defeat, but not becoming a failure, went on to win the Nobel Prize

– yesterday, at the London Olympic, Michael went on to break world swimming record.

Life gives us those stories to instruct and illustrate the point, unveiling new heights and setting new benchmarks.

Stay away from the Nay sayers. Prove them wrong. Or even better, think of them as never existed, for the longer we do, the more likely that this will come to pass.

Yesterday, I blogged about The Limits. But that was just one side of the coin. Today, there is another.

We have physical limits. But we reach out still to the stars. Feet on the ground, but eyes on the prize.

One more try. Then one more.

Another heart beat, then another. Breathe in and breathe out. Wax on and wax off. Karate Kid all grown up. Use all the pain and suffering and waste them not. They were there  to make us and not to break us. Each of us is different, not because of our limits, but because of how we dealt with those limits.   90 per cent inspiration, 10 per cent perspiration. Multiply that to the nth time. While perspiration is limited, inspiration is limitless.

Time to take stock

So this is Christmas, what have you done? Year-end review and future projection.

Cloud strategy? Hiring and firing decision? Productivity squeeze and cost cutting? (female shoppers said they planned to spend 1% less as compared to last year).

Time to take stock, at individual and institutional level.

New calendar.

Hollywood is going to Detroit (greener pasture).

And the Ark finally found its home in Kentucky (Noah or Colonel Sanders, your choice).

Fund raisers are targeting public buildings and venues (Verizon stadium etc….).

There will emerge new industries (cloud system integrator , google glasses, google cars, google scanners ….).

Thanks to Social Media, I watch more of YouTube .

Meanwhile, not a day goes by without us seeing something coming out of China (reverse engineering Russian weaponry, Shanghai Math and Science champions, huge increase in its Africa’s raw materials and South-South global strategy.)

When John Lennon left us “standing here”, he couldn’t have seen the “long winding road” ahead. 30 years was a long time. Enough to turn BRIC countries to where they are today. “Imagine” the world 30 years from now.

We are so used to annual review, not decades in review:

(war is still raging on because men are still with that strand of evil –  albeit the Genome project could account for most of human DNA) “So this is Christmas, What have you done?”

Because of Lennon’s commemoration, 1980 feels like just last year.

In taking out an icon, the fame hitchhiker inadvertently immortalized his victim.

In her NYT piece , Yoko wrote “ours – our family – was one of giggling, teenager-like”. She mentioned laughter but I read it through a veil of tears.

J.L. would have been 70. Yet he still is “on the cover of the Rolling Stone“, just as a line in a song. You just never know. To musicians and artists (Lennon and Van Gogh) taking stock goes beyond the grave. In fact, it’s the long tail of a winding road.

 

Luxury brands beach-heading VN

It started with Gucci and LV. More will be coming to test the warers, from McDonald to KFC , from Starbucks to Burger King.   Everybody is into location, location, location. I look at the city as if it were a big fairground, where interested parties are staking out their prime real estate. Flag and flip.

Both AE and Abercrombie are selling well among the youth segment (XS size).

And Hollister also (if they only knew what cow country the place was in No Cal).

Floating dinners on the Saigon River facing an Japanese alley.

In the backpacker’s section,  Lonely Planet guides are sold and read like bibles: “don’t drink from tab water”, “make sure you visit the Cu Chi Tunnel” etc..

And “The Sorrow of War” by Bao Ninh, available as cigarettes sold in open boxes.

Westerners love Vietnam. It presents a challenge to their categorical living: Vietnam doesn’t fit neatly into their frame of reference. Now with Gucci and LV facing Hotel Caravelle, and Sheraton/Hyatt, with beggars and lottery peddlers lounging out front, the scene begs for an asterisk (*) in an otherwise neatly classified tour. I saw a tourist almost tripped over an uneven pavement.

You want to tour Vietnam, you ‘d better drop your preconception and expectation. Tourists can ride cyclo tour or Cu Chi tour, peddling and crawling around, but  you will come away never forgetting those indelible smiles:, crooked teeth but definitely no Mona Lisa‘s . Post-war hardship has given birth to an insatiable demands for goods.  Luxury brands are welcome! And coming they are.