Tag: New York Times

Switching the script

On film set, writer is often called out on short notice to fix the dialogue.

Something is better left unsaid or sounded odd when in “live” context.

In life, we can’t retrace our steps to switch the script.

It’s live, and happened once only.

There lies the importance of getting the right words first time around.

Another way to lessen the impact of misspoken words, is to come out immediately and retract.

Even the NYT does that.

When the facts are not straight, when a character is mis-portrayed, the best way for editors to damage control is to come out clean.

We happen to live on this side of the communication (data) explosion.

Facts and fiction are both out there.

As mentioned in Brand America a few blogs ago, people do come here and reinvent themselves e.g. name change (anglicized), hair-coloring and new wardrobe. Voila! Boy George and Bieber. Entertainers and sports idols are hot. They are more than hot. They sell merchandise.

Just Do  It.

After all, we move about our days, filtering ads and spam mail.

No wonder we long for those “in” mail.

Someone cares enough to probe and not to pitch.

And we in turn empathize with their plights, the pressures they are under.

If only we could switch the script. Living a new life and assuming a new persona.

Like when we were kids, imagining we had just been adopted by our real parents.

We wished for another life, another script (if only the writer were standing by as fixer).

Then we would be reclaimed, taken back to the castle and live a happy life ever after.

When I grew up, there was such a story. Of a half-breed (African-Vietnamese). Co Ba Xi. The man who had fathered her left only to come back years later as King of his tribe. Vietnamese Cinderella. But that’s just one jewel among a variety of Immigrant stories, ranging from model minority stories to loser’s stories.

One last thing about scripting. As long as we live out our story, and not someone else’s.

At the end of all travel is to return to the same place and to know ourselves for the first time.

It is often said, life is 10 per cent action and 90 per cent reaction. When a large part of life is lived out of reaction instead of proactive, we are not living our life script. Paul Anka would be proud to hear his “My Way” sung by 7 Billion.

Why wait for the writer to come to our rescue?

We are the writers, we are the world.

While still alive, we can switch the script, reinvent the characters, and overcome the challenges.

As long as we know what we want.

Or seek help. There are people who are gentle and kind (not just in San Francisco or down in the Bayou), and whose advice are plenty and fitting (learned this in Vietnam. People still give out free advice as if they were still living in a village).

I am indebted to professionals on LinkedIn, who endorsed my skill set and characters.

I am grateful for “followers” . People who trek the trail of current Recession and the trajectory of Social Media.

What a time we are living in, and what a company we are keeping. Just as we thought we should throw in the towel, then comes help.

I am the sum of my relationships. Two old people in their early 40’s were still at it, hence, creating me.

Now I live out that script, all the while hoping to switch those last pages.

Hope to read about your multi-chapter, multi-tasking life whose script is not written in stone, but evolving with unpredictable twist and turn and whose ending is happy albeit not perfect.

Learning as motivator

From papyrus to paper, from microfiche to microphone, we use technology for knowledge transfer.

Learning is a great motivator. Once started it never stops (in my death-bed, I probably still ask the attending nurse what all those charts mean, and why not this and that).

Don’t believe in learning curve (as if once you got over it, you own it. There will always be pace learning i.e. know, forget, know again as if for the first time).

Politicians on their first term barely learn how to get back from the underground of the Capitol or stay out of SE part of town (I heard it is now quite gentrified).

Coursera has been a great success. It harnesses technology to extend learning to the mass. Technology as slaves, not masters.

Lift them up, not put them down. I enjoy reading about the Indian IT and call center folks enjoy their night out at a disco, Chinese tourists flocking the streets of Paris or Vietnamese students coming to CAL State. Let them come. With traveling comes learning. With learning people are more open-minded.

Here in Vietnam, cable TV shows Hollywood car chase, guns blazing etc… With exposure  comes the exercise of choices.

Tolstoy doesn’t believe in true freedom of choice (free will vs predestination).

Still, the urge to learn, to discover, to connect and to advance one’s self is innate

The only difference between acquiring information online vs at Ivy League institutions is the socialization of knowledge. Upper-class kids would meet and marry (imperial alliance model) one another, hence perpetuating the ruling class.

But in those far-away lands (Timbuktu), with internet, who can stop a genius from acquiring information about protons, neutrons and electrons. Physics is physics. International grad students might stick out like a sore thumb given their speech and dress code (formal).

I saw kids in the Mekong Delta riding bikes, then crossing a river on ferry to get to school. And that’s on a sunny day. When it rains, I don’t see how they can get to school in dry uniforms (one heart-broken story last year. A boat full of students sunk and students never made it to school).

Learning as motivator.

Then, shoes and broadband. Thomas Friedman, author of the World is Flat, had similar ideas in the NYT today.

Learning as motivator.

The things they carry. Turn those swords into plowshares.

Angel of Death into Angel of Learning, Agent Orange into Agent of Change.

Broadband for rural, broadband against ruin.

Nobody can stop a man from learning. Not even in the confine of a prison.

Senator McCain was detained for a while in Hanoi Hilton. He now sits on Senate committees. Tell me he did not learn a thing or two while being detained.

Learning takes many forms and takes place when least  expected (even from the bottom).

To learn one must first be humble and teachable. One must be motivated even on a ferry-boat or one’s death-bed.

Personality as motivator

Besides fun, fear and need for recognition, each of us is motivated by an unique set of triggers.

Some are expressive e.g. talk it out to then realize what they think.

Analytical people, however, weigh the pros and cons before opening their mouths.

Amiable people just empathize, feely-touchy and are good listeners

Social folks love to smok’em at barbecue parties: the more the merrier.

Finally, the quickest of all are the Alpha-Male types: shoot first aim later.

Most managers have been managed by other managers, who in turn, pass down the command-control model.

Just Do It!

And they are right half of the time.

When workers left their company, nobody bothered to do a post-mortem.

It’s like a death in the family. To be politically correct, nobody should mention the “others” who are no longer “us”.

Write if off on the left column, as burnt rate, from attrition.

Even in warfare, military historians take years of reflection and review to extract “lessons learned”.

Companies cannot afford this. Just hire new staff. Invest in new head counts.

The (vicious) cycle starts again. One motivational model imposed on various types off workers.

My way or highway.

The best middle manager is the one who can negotiate and walk the fine line between corporate interests and line workers/market expectations, between Wall Street and Main Street.

The best leaders are ones who can detect conflicting signals sent up and down the chain. Without the people carrying out strategies and tactics, things don’t move. But to move so fast in the wrong direction is much worse. (see Matterhorn or My Lai Massacre).

It boils down to attitude, aim and action. Recent article in the NYT shows that people who adjust their course mid-stream (after examining underlining assumptions)  can pivot to success. It’s not difficult to apply the right mix of motivators. But first, one needs to be self-motivated and undergo self-examination (ego? pride? face-saving?).

And this process is hard. Look yourself in the mirror, know all the weaknesses  and seek redemption. That’s when things start to turn. There is no coach that will yell at you. Just an empty locker room at half-time. Helmets off. Sweat and tears. The score board doesn’t lie. We are all behind, to face imminent loss. And worst of, loss of self-confidence. Seek the right mix of motivators for your team, yourself and your families. Tough-love yourself.

Self-decoding

Our gene distribution and mutation have a lot in common (survival instinct, reproduction, empathy etc…). But from there, each of us is different and unique: some poets, others warriors or both.

Haruki Murakami is both a writer and a runner (100 km race).  Richard Blanco, who will recite at Obama’s Inauguration, is both an engineer and a poet.

Leonardo Da Vinci was multi-talented. I am threading in Malcolm Gladwell’s waters here. What makes a person genius? How did they find that out? Early or late in life (Raymond Carver took writing courses late in life).

What if we are “outliers”, but go about life undiscovered, undecoded?

What line do we have to cross to “find ourselves”?

10,000 hours of doing the same thing? Solving problems at the same level they occurred has never worked. Just think of failed relationships (rooted in dysfunctional families, then manifest itself later in life).

A new generation of young Americans are defining themselves with acronyms (NYT latest on Annette Bening and Warren Beatty kids).

Being first-wave immigrant, I serve as a bridge, for my American-born daughters to cross-over.

They are on Facebook and Twitter. They wear jeans and use I-phones.

They text (while I twist, well, not that old. My brother did) often times with abbreviation and speak a language of their peers.

While I enjoyed lengthy 20-minute long CCR’s O Suzie Q and Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love, they watch viral  YouTube’s clips.

I belong to a generation that enjoyed getting blasted at, while theirs is an uploading one (one-to-many vs many-to-many communication).

They can “read” someone instinctively (gene mutation?), decoding people rather quickly. I meanwhile grew up learning how to  entertain guests, give them benefits of the doubt (not three-strikes-you-are-out).

They speak in short bursts and shorthands. My prof’s however spent a lot of time setting up a theme before getting to the heart of their lectures.

We learn to comprehend and communicate bound by technology of any given time (a tweet lasts only 140 characters, with some buffering).

I remember sending post cards home when doing relief work overseas.

Before I get to what I wanted to say, I ran out of room. Overseas long distance phone calls were quite prohibitive. Even now, to call back to the US from Timbuktu is quite daunting.

Life is a crash course in understanding ourselves and our surroundings.

It might end abruptly, and there are no final exams. We will have to rely on others to “see” for us (director’s cut or uncut, novelist, poet and priest).

Born with this inability to see ourselves with our own eyes (only reflection in the mirror), we are humble and eager to discover more, to surprise ourselves at times: we have more courage, flexibility and nobility than we know. Only when we are in good company, in danger that a better version of ourselves emerge.

Outliers know this early in life. Others just focus on one or two things they are passionate about. Runner-writer, engineer-poet. What if you are better in the kitchen than in the boardroom? We call them chefs and not chiefs. And it’s OK too, given today’s technology e.g. YouTube. I hope your secret sauce go viral. Just make sure you speak in short bursts when targeting younger audience.

Fool’s errand?

On NYT‘s Op-Ed‘s Pages, I found a piece “Asians are too smart for their own good”.

The author brought up a historical parallel between Jews’s admission at Ivy League schools back then, and Asian‘s now.

She neglected another important parallel: Japanese-American got put in internment camps not too long ago. With BRIC‘s second generation, growing up in America, demographic make up will once again be more diverse.

By 2050, Asia will have stepped up to claim its top spot. By then, demand will outweigh supply of needed talent.

White Ivy League students are more than welcome to prepare themselves for the day, same way I was sent to French school, then to EFL schools, then to State School, then to Private schools etc…. Gotta to pay the price of admission.

Not just the tuition.

Besides, with global communication and global commerce, Ivy League Institutions themselves are facing crisis. High-valued professors from these places are moon-lighting and contracted out to the highest bidders in Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and India anyway.

I am not sure who has done more learning: professors or students in these regions.

America is still a magnet and market for the likes of Google’s founders, for now.

But the jury is still out for the next big thing. Cisco , Google and GE are agressive in talent acquisition.

A degree from an Ivy League school might get you into the door, but does not ensure your staying there, much less rising.

I am not naive about the climb from within, with glass ceiling and all.

But give society and corporations some time.  First women, then minority. (at this edit, Lean In has just come out – giving modern women something to discuss).

There are no rush to judgment. I understand the timeliness of this issue (admission to college. It’s called Senior panic). But one needs to take a long view back (to WW II at the very least) and forward (2050).

It’s a wonderful and widely connected world. There is no need to play the victim card. Just the value card. After all, the genes and genius cannot be hidden for long. We got Youtube, Twitter and Linkedin. If those platforms are not enough, invent your own “religion”. There is no need to be a follower. Asian families are better at making followers than leaders out of their children.

The weakness lies in its strength: Tiger Mom reproduces Tiger mindset. On that note, Jewish mothers can agree with Asian mothers: “They” are after us. So unfair! Personally, I don’t think it will ever be a fool’s errand for anyone (Asian are a subset) to be overly educated and enlightened. It’s our mission in life.

Crying girl

I walked by a shop today and I saw a girl holding a knife, crying.

She was peeling onion for the restaurant.

Artificially induced tears. Not triggered by sad emotion.

Real, nevertheless.

It made me appreciate behind-the-scene people (since I happened to have breakfast with real onion, the same kind this girl was peeling).

Nickel-and-dime folks make a living by sweat and tears.

Or those who shed blood for our nation’s security.

Blood, sweat and tears.

My friend’s Dad who recently passed away, used to deliver a sermon on Jesus Wept.

The I-am-with-you gesture only God incarnatel can extend.

Go ahead and tell the Newtown parents to stop crying.

Tears from the onion peel might stop, but tears that well from within (induced by tragedy uncalled for) are hard to stop. Ever. They will creep up at unexpected hours, in the dark of the night, or in the middle of a crowded lunch hour.

I am sure the girl I saw had been doing this for a while, if not everyday.

She knows when to stop, but then, not stopping too long.

The mechanical reliability performed by human.

If only the owner went ahead and bought a machine.

Then the girl would be out of a job.

She would then be crying for real.

Some factory girl in China would dutifully ship the order, my job over yours.

Blood, sweat and tears.

We were “cursed” to toil the ground per breaking the contract with our Maker. For now, tears to make a living in Saigon, tears for neighbor’s kids in Newtown, Our Town, and tears in Heaven, as Eric Clapton put it.

Yes, we need perspectives and point of view to overcome tragedy. We also need help and comfort from one another (in Newtown, strangers gave each other a hug, very needed hug). No man’s an island. Many eat onion, some don’t. But someone got to peel the damn thing. What I saw today was real tears. What I saw on the NYT photos the other day, was digital, but real nevertheless. Jesus wept. Not just Crying Girl, but also Crying God.

Least resistance

Organizations and people in them tend to take this path.

Status quo. Business as usual. The comfort of routine. The predictable, mechanical rhythm. Makes the world go round. Until we drop out. One person at a time. Dust comes to dust. But the morgue still sends the bills. Please pay by a certain date, or else, interests will be applied. Routine red tape again.

Beyond death, even our own, the system goes on, to claim its next subject (victim), from birth to burial, from cradle to the grave. Have you noticed that we all got wrapped in those institutional blankets when we first arrived, and the same when we exit. They may even wrap a wrist band around us for ID. Try to enjoy sunshine, because the beginning and the end, are all lighted by fluorescent lights.

Path of least resistance. Fight not against the system. Especially Health care.

When you need its services, you are not in a bargaining position. We saw the shake up of the banking system over the last few years. Those shiny lobbies and marble floors, silk ties and slick suits. They jut paid the fine, and moved on . Now, it’s business as usual.

Shake not the system. Follow the path of least resistance. Start here, end there.

We have always done it this way. Get back to the bottom of the totem pole.

Shake not the pole.  We just pay lip services like “the more the merrier”, but the reality is Earth’s 7 billion are not welcome. We are not resource-rich enough to welcome all (you would think with the vast expanse we call the United States, people would do away with Up Stairs Down Stairs, as in crowded Britain. Yet, still “no room in the inn”, and the map got divided into Red States and Blue States. Geography of the mind, more than of the map.) Tighten the border and the security. Status quo reigns. Until death claims one at a time. Just read the NYT‘s obituary page. You’ll see. When faced with the fork along the way, take the road less travel, not the path of least resistance.

Learning by failing

NYT Opinion Page wants to debate about being informed vs being educated.

With the dcline of Newsweek, readers have moved on to Google News (ironically, today celebrates National Print Day) and other mobile content.

Short bursts: Obama won the debate. The Giants got chemistry.

We will someday think that a tweet, 140 characters, is too long.

Just like the 2-minute  microwave oven wait (used to shorten boiling time down to 2 minutes from 5).

That’s how quick our brain evolves

Yet there is no substitute for trying and failing.

Those lessons stuck around longer, since they are more personal.

Time we could have spent with our kids.

Money we could have invested in an art course that could help turn passion into profit etc… Yet, we only have regrets to show for.

In business, we missed a few steps: being too late to market, or too early.

Committing too few resources to a gigantic task (thinking we were exceptions to the rule such as Valley of Death, burnt rates etc…).

Failing begets failing.

We all hide our weakness and failure.

The culture of celeb and cinema extolls IMAGE (of heroism and hedonism).

We are supposed to be cool, hip and always on point.

In life, it’s only one take. Action and cut. And that’s a wrap.

Those who rehearsed more will get  it righ the first time.

Either way, no pain no gain.

We rehearse i.e. fumbling through, learning a new angle , a new way to interpret the script.

Life has its own script for us: put in the hours, get something back. Spend wisely and save for rainy days.

That script is universal.

Yet we keep having to relearn it. Mostly, by failing to adhere to it.

But then, whose life is it that doesn’t stray from the track? McGovern of S Dakota?

Bush of Austin, TX? or Arnold in Hollywood.  Everyone seems to have a book out. All learned by doing, by failing. The WSJ titled McGovern “Bested by Nixon“.

Will your life and mine be remembered by one defining failure? Then why do we need a whole book? Save a tree.  Just tweet, something like: I THOUGHT I WAS AN EXCEPTION TO THE RULE. I WAS NOT. HARD EARNED LESSONS.

Now go celebrate National Print Day. Read about others’ struggles and striving. How they handled their own failures.

Maybe we can learn by their failing besides our own.

Tech talk

NYT‘s David Brooks zoomed out to reveal the evolution of our social philosophy, from care for the Soul, to Personality then eventually to Decision-making (data deluge).

This is the age of the intelligent machine. Massaging data. Algorithm and Analytic.

No wonder, machine language also creeps into our daily speech.

Let’s try to pin them down.
First we google it.

Terms like cramming, cookies, cache . Technology trumps  theology.

A friend tries to ramp up her business. But she needs to retool herself with business and soft skills.

Let’s get cranked up. You are running low on bandwith.

He gunned the engine, but given high gas price of late, he ended up running on empty.

He hardly processes the information before pulling the plug on the project.

One needs to fast-track the program. Otherwise, we call it pre-empt.

EV Battery company runs out of juice, but us human runs low on battery.

With the advent of social media, we are inundated with invitations from strangers whom we don’t want to interface with.

He goes about his day on auto-pilot.

We are analog creatures using digital devices.

Just pop the TV dinner into the microwave.

You look stressed. You need to press “reset”.

Please scan your right index finger for identification, raise and stretch both arms (let everything drop) for the metal-detector.

The class doesn’t tune in to the lecture tonight.

I am exhausted; I need to reboot.

If you rushed to market , you might crash.

As far as this relationship goes, it’s been on screen-saving mode.

Exhausted, I feel I need a massage to recharge.

There was a time in the 60’s when terms like “groovy”, “swell” etc.. appeared then disappeared.

It is to show as a species, we do move on to better “versions”. In social psychology, we concentrate on WE (60’s), then ME (70’s) and now IT (the machine). Someday, it will be MIT (me and machine – Ipod, Iphone, Ipad going to bed together. My nephew sleeps with the I-pad on, to listen to audio-books).

Issues like interoperability, integration and convergence were dealt with in the Bicentennial Man.

In the end, Robin Williams who  played the Machine, asked to be terminated. He regret not being able to cry, like us.

Life is like peeling the onion, one layer at a time. Sometimes, it makes us cry. I would rather die a man than to live in eternity as a machine, quoted Andrew Martin. In other words, please “unplug” me when it’s time to go. Someone quoted aptly that “Jesus wept”. Crying has been a privilege.

It also makes us human. It even makes God human. Empathic we are. I feel for the machine, who no matter at what speed of processing, cannot shed tears. Maybe David Brooks can write a code to teach the machine to evolve, from data and decision matrix to have some personality, and eventually to care for the Soul. Man and Machine can then meet half-way.

Imponderables

Dead Valley is known to be the hottest place on Earth.

Yet millions have traveled pass there on their way to Las Vegas.

Venture Capitalists are also well versed in what’s so called “valley of death” i.e. when a start-up moved pass its honey-moon stage, and simply cannot sustain the burnt rate.

Yet people keep trying.

Then, aside from “death” rate, we got divorce rate.

Yet people keep falling in love, and getting married.

Hint: more shopping and spending for a family of two and more.

In America, there is no shortage of imponderables.

I am starting to read Paterno bio. I could barely get through the first few pages.

Something quite imponderable there (despite the lucid prose).

After all, what happened in America, stayed in America.

Sex shops, butcher shops.

Churches and strip clubs, sometimes near each other.

Schools and parks (for homeless people) near fast-food and donuts joints.

Dental office next to candy shop.

And 24-hr gym (all you can lift)  near Hometown Buffet (all you can eat). Go figure.

America spends a large chunk of change on incarceration, pornography (hard and soft e.g. NYT best-seller list, top 3 are taken by the same author who caters to women taste for escapism), guns and amos (especially amos, modeled after HP cartridge business model), medical marijuana and spirits (that get you on a downward spiral).

My name is Thang. And I am not an alcoholic. So help me God.

Somewhere somehow, the line has been moved: the incarcerated are better cared for than the non-incarcerated.

The top 1% refuses to pick up golf balls, while the rest can’t afford meat balls.

Kids aren’t learning (slipped in ranking), while workers need to but can’t get it paid for by the employers or government.

Politicians are talking, but leaders aren’t leading.

We are bidding for time, for election, for miracles, and are freezed like deers in front of approaching head lights.

Actors are either making quiet retreat (Sundance Festival), or gone overboard (Eastwood and Samuel Jackson).

It’s the best time to be in  late-night comedy.

But SNL fans can’t stay up late (wrong demographic for that time slot).

Voting booths seem to always have problems in Florida. (Voters should be required to have an eye-exam). We are enjoying our time on the deck, but forgot to check the ship’s name. ( Titanic ?).

Even if it’s free, no ride lasts forever.

Every once in a while, we need to check the navigating instrument. No such thing as auto-piloting (Google unmanned car?).

Not in this age of post-innocence. Not at this time of austerity. Not now. Not ever. We need to be vigilant against those who quack like a leader, walk like a leader, but in fact, are not leaders at all. Leadership comes with a price. They come to take credits. This is the root of all imponderables: those who can’t lead, lead. Those who can, refuse to stay in the game.