Tag: Newsweek

Your chance

Elton John had a song out a while ago. Your Song.

Newsweek, when it was still in print, had a page called My Turn (that had been before the Internet with immediate comments and re-tweet).

Now, the Art of the Start‘s author, Guy Kawasaki, asked readers what they want included in his next revision of the book.

Your chance.

Your 15-minutes of fame.

Smile, take the diploma and get off campus.

We all know that feeling of emptying out the space made for incoming replacement.

An office, a house or even a car with too many mileage on it.

We know we have had our chance, or exhausted it.

Others will see and seize the opportunity differently, from their angle and maybe the timing is better.

Tina Turner  said that she had sung Proud Mary a thousand times, but the way it was delivered was different each time (largely because of different venue and audience).

So we have had our chance. Or making ways for new ones.

As long as we don’t waste our talent pursuing second-best options.

At work or in life, natural selection will nudge us along the time continuum.

No way around it.

Something in the DNA combo that send out signals to the world.

I am here.

I exist in the now.

Come and get me. Find me. I want to be found, to be validated and to be heard.

Some need stroking more than others. But all of us need and deserve a chance to make our marks.

With current almost-bounced back economy, here is our chance. Once again, to “see the good side of the city… on the riverboat Queen”.

The fact that we are still here is a testimony to everyone’s resilience. I might not write as smoothly as Tom Clancy, look as husky as Paul Walker, or think as different as Steve Jobs. But I am still here, blogging along. So are you. Go celebrate life. Explore and exhaust all your chances. Chances are, there are still plenty , unexploited and begging to dance (to quote Jackson Browne ” Opportunity likes to dance with those who are already on the dance floor”). “I hope you don’t mind, I hope you don’t mind, I wrote down…these lines”.

Albert Einstein once said ” the saddest tragedy in life is a wasted talent”. Along that line, I would say, the most disappointed thing in life is to miss your Andy Warhol’s 15-minutes of fame. So walk up there, take your diploma, and smile at the camera. And one more for your mom. It’s a digital age now. Don’t worry about those wasted shots way back then, when each of us was rationed with only 36 shots on a roll or  the weekly My Turn. In Marketing class, we used to dream of inventing deodorant to sell to the billions in China. Now, we got 14 Billions eye balls ready to peruse our pitch, 24/7. Turns out that it’s not the lack of opportunity on the dance floor (or the floor itself for that matter). It’s our feet which are reluctant and us recluse. Frogs-in-slow-boiled state. Don’t know where to start? Tell Guy Kawasaki. Your chance to have input and insecurity dissipated.

The Remains of Print

The Post is now under new ownership. So is the iconic Newsweek. Both incidentally got taken over by jungle-like entities like Amazon and the Beast, respectively. New world order (or jungle order). The “barbarians” are once again at the gate.

New totem pole. New titanic shift, from analog to digital, from print to online.

I prefer to see this change-over than seeing the Washington Times taken over by  a then cultic figure (Moon).

Big play. Big players. The game of influence. of Soft Powers and soft-wares.

It’s the other shoe that drops (from the time of the Reformation, with the advent of the printing press).

Back then, it was the free circulation of the Bible among the mass ( oral and scribal tradition).  Now, it’s the viral popularity of an Islamic scholar studying the life of a “political”  Jesus

With Al Jazeera (the other CNN) and Amazon, we got the complete set of opinion leaders for our world.

Want to know something? go on Wikipedia.

Want to hear something? plenty of cable channels.

Want to buy something? go on Amazon.com.

Jeff was telling interviewers that his favorite book was “the Remains of the Day” (about a butler who saw the change or more likely, the decline of aristocracy in the West).

Now, he finds himself amidst another real-life decline, a paradigm shift. And all that remains of print are those Google’s scanned pages (our modern equivalent of microfiche) for researchers of historical facts.

We process information differently. In print, we interact with those fonts and we turn the pages.

Online, we are glued to the screen, and before we know it, we might click on porn pages.

Just one of the many differences.

As creatures, we have yet learned how to handle the beast.

Massive inflow of content. Sheep among wolves.

Sleepy eyes and desensitized filters.

7 billion souls, one web site (Google).

We search that which reinforces our prejudice (a priori), or when lazy, let the SEO bots dictate what we are exposed to.

All that remains are stove-pipe thinking. More alliances and armed comrades are formed. But less in original thinking.

We need another generation or two before we can handle this new change (by then, it’s a new norm).

No more memoirs in print. Just sensational up-to-the-minute expose on celebrity and consumerism.

Those who have built good “filter” will become great curators of this new information explosion.

Those who don’t, won’t.

The new divide (information gap) won’t be geographical. It will be content-rich and content-poor folks.

The the twain shall never meet.

All that remains are for the brokers to exploit, and the pipe deliverers to profit in this new “jungle” whose sole law is survival of the smartest.

In this post-print environment, we need to say farewell to prejudices. We need to learn to be childlike, to soak in new and uncomfortable piece of news. To be changed and change-agent. It will be a tearful farewell to “home”, where each morning we expect to see sunrise and newspaper delivered on the front lawn. All that remains is a new You, with all the changes in one’s life time, more than our great grandparents and later generations have ever experienced.

That’s how important this tectonic shift is. It’s a bookend to a long overdue, but necessary re-structuring: modernity and progress.

 

Cranking up, hanging in

Post-holiday blues. Cabin fever. And the return of routine.

And the Oscar goes to……

We weeded out unwanted inventory and unfriended people.

Clearing the deck and crank up the engine.

Sports Illustrated illustrates tan and skin underneath winter jacket.

While Readers Digest finally suffers inDigestion.

Books of the Times and books of the Post.

New faces and new titles ( from “How to get filthy rich in Asia” to “A Good Son”).

I was at the opening of a branch library yesterday.

I had never seen anything like it: families lined up and singed up for library cards, as if it were Black-Friday Sales.

Since when people are that much interested in books.

It must be because of pent-up demand in this area.

Tom Clancy still pairs up with other writers to crank out humongous volumes on the genre.

While Grisham sticks with litigation.

Writers cranked up and not cramped up.

Everyone hangs in there, at least those who can still be productive and sell.

Venues might have changed i.e. Newsweek and Readers Digest out! but demand are there (Amazon’s Kindle and B&N’s nook).

I have picked up on Facebook chat (over the top platform) and found it more convenient than the old purple Yahoo messenger.

Change has come to me.

The future is now. The library has opened, but with more desktops and less bookshelves.

More best-sellers and less of the old inventory.

Of course, with no Clearance Sales, at least, not yet.

And the Oscar  goes to….some winners for sure.

I read an article about the Oscar set. It should look very magnificent on TV, with a promise to ” turn Stars into star-gazers”.

Winners or losers, Oscar or Daytona, we hang in there and move forward.

Time flows just one way. And it waits for no one. With no action, even angels leave us.

Wait not for the snow to melt. Put on those boots and march on. Get cranked up and hang not in there for too long.

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.

Outside the bubble

When you are inside, you are hard-presed and unable to think.

But when you are out of the bubble, it’s illuminating.

You are able to look back, to gain perspectives.

Bubble by definition is that which encompasses those who subscribe to its rules (deposit here, withdraw there).

We got the Tulip mania in Holland, Ponzi scheme in Florida, dot.con and most recently, housing.

In fact, more are in the making (student loan, green tech etc…).

High stakes and high rewards.

But then, who would want to jump in to that which has already been proven 100%.

There is always “acceptable loss” “sot and hard trend”.

But what is acceptable to one is not acceptable to the other.

So we could never really be outside of a bubble.

We are inter-linked with others: friends, families, and co-workers.

They will be the ones who whisper “it’s just between you and me”.

Few  were able to foresee this past housing crisis.

Now we all are on this side of it, with some residues and long tail effects.

What lessons learned? Take-aways?

Are we wiser while poorer?

A friend’s Dad has just passed away.

At my last visit, his words were “let me sleep a little bit”.

The drug had taken its effect.

When we are in a bubble, perhaps we “sleep a little bit”.

Why think?

Social proof ( the majority are always right).

So we let down our guards, exercise not our survival instincts.

We forgot to fight, the way gladiators used to each day.

Our sense of “flight or fight” has been put to sleep.

After all, it’s the bank, the rating agencies, the press.

All well-regarded institutions, with huge marble lobbies and high ceilings.

I heard of more lay-offs (Motorola under Google, Newsweek gone under for the second time etc..).

Not a  good sign!

To shake all off, takes some time.

Just like healing and grief process, maybe all we need is time.

The bubble crushed dreams. Just like Fukushima and earthquake.

We just don’t see it in that “disastrous” light, but its tolls are the same, if not deeper.

When we recover from a bubble, we lost that which made us successful in the first place: self-confidence.

To restore that takes baby steps.

One small win at a time.

But those baby steps are outside the bubble, not huge strides we made inside.

What an irony. Should have been the other way around. In hindsight!

But with each baby step, the strength will come back, for the long journey ahead.

Watch out for another bubble on the horizon. No risks no rewards.

Moving on

I read about and followed with much interest the Penn State game this past weekend.

Where is Joe? First he was absent on the side line, where his rolled up pants were a fixture more than signature.

Then he went up on the booth. This past Saturday, he wasn’t there either, nor was his statue. Ohio won, but not as easy.

The Nittany Lions put up a fight “push them back, way back”. Still, a lot went unsaid there. Just moving on. Motion forward.

Aren’t we all!

Labor Day, Memorial Day. First rest a bit, then Rest in Peace.

Moving on.

Self-deception.

Who are we trying to fool, except ourselves?

I read about the original cell which stays on for billions of years. I am glad we could die (rather cancer war than casualty of war). As  far as biology is concerned, we were meant to be immortal, Greek or geek.

But then, with all the abuses and accidents, we have pretty much done it to ourselves (global sales of weapon, pornography and drugs together curtail population explosion).

So we give the workers a symbolic rest, Labor Day. But actually, we meant for factories to have their machines deep-spayed and well-oiled.

Farmers don’t rest on Labor Day. IT supports don’t rest either in colo centers.

Labor Day belongs to the Industrial Revolution, the 2nd wave, with coal as the main source of energy.

I read that in an interview before his death, an out-spoken Cardinal talked about the Vatican being behind two centuries.

He must be referring to the image of  Sheep May Safely Graze while parishioners “flocking” to the only village church.

I think it’s Marshall McLuhan who coins the phrase “global village”. Even then, he  meant the mass brought together by mass media (Tower of Babel analogy) in a one-to-many broadcast. Little did he know, we now have many-to-many conversation, originated and uploaded from the ground level. As of now, everyone got their 15-minute of fame on Facebook (Famebook?) and 140 characters on Twitter (modern-day AP) – as in United Breaks My Guitar.  Perhaps even we, at one time or another, think, maybe the world can use a few personal computers, as Watson used to think back in 1943.

Institutions and individuals, both are behind the times. I caught myself a few months ago in a moment of prejudice. I heard a ringtone rap music. Not from urban blacks. But with Central Vietnamese accent. The combination shocked me, then it delighted me the second time around. But my knee-jerked reaction was “you must be kidding?” One would expect to hear Northern Vietnamese accent  in songs, not Central, and when it comes to rap music, it’s the American quintessential, not Vietnamese. If this long Depression does us any good, it’s a wake-up call. It humbles us . Yes, it’s the “end of men” as titled in an upcoming book, but by the time the “end of women” comes about, it’s the beginning of the machine age.

The point is, early adopters will keep on adopting (space tourism, echo tourism, edu- tourism, medi-tourism )

And the richest among them, will keep moving beyond Beverly Hills and Betty Ford clinics to “the Island” to do some serious make-over (spare body parts replacement and rejuvenation). Versailles-style ($17,000 leather boots).

Go ahead and protest. Show some guts and show some skin. By the time we do, they no longer find some use for fur coats to cover their once wrinkled bodies. They already got new ones put in. Talking about moving on. Just make sure we don’t become the Pharaohs of the 21st century, embalming ourselves to no avail.  Where is Joe Pa? Ohio won again. Shuck!

Start acting

After the trilogy: Start seeing, start hearing and start thinking, I am on the roll.

Behaviorists have debated whether action precedes attitude, or vice versa.

Nike commands: JUST DO IT.

Start acting.

Some guy somewhere mustered his courage to ask for a girl’s hand.

That girl after much deliberation, accepted.

Boom! Action. We are conceived out of love in action.

From conception to cremation, you and I are products of someone else’s action.

In between, it’s on us to act.

Quick assessment of the situation, weighing the options, pros and cons, Bang! Done it.

In case you are curious, I wasn’t born with silver spoon. Indeed, quite the contrary.

But I was schooled in French , then Vietnamese elite high school, then Penn State and Wheaton (private college).

In between school years, I raised my money to travel the world and do relief work.

Action.

A Newsweek article about Boat People dying at seas? Let’s go!

Action.

On the roof of an overcrowding prison-turned-refugee camp, there was space for worship?

Boom.

Let’s carry the amplifiers (heavy) and supplies to hold open church, open door.

People need to pass their time while awaiting resettlement to a third-country? Boom, let’s keep them busy with Present tense (English), and mostly Future tense (hope).

Action justifies everything: our existence, and out earning. While in action, we might face objection and obstacle. Bruce Lee said, “screw the obstacles, I create my own opportunities”.

Start acting. It’s scary at first. Like the first walk on our own, or the ride on the bike,  or that first stroke in the stream.

I don’t ask you to try extreme sports. Just to act on what you know needed action.

Please don’t wait for Superman.

Or like the invalid who lays around the healing pool, and missed out a total of 38 chances of getting healed.

Action also means positive: start carrying that tune in your head, energy burned is energy earned.

What’s your war chant?

Could you arouse people’s emotion and instill their confidence?

Start acting, and you may in the process, become what you are meant to be all along.

That guy who asked that girl for her hand, is not an unsolvable riddle. They are our parents in whose images we are shaped.

My Turn

For years, Newsweek had devoted one-page My Turn for reader’s Op-ed. This move paved the way for crowdsourcing and blogging, which are both technology-enabled (same way the Karaoke machine let the audience to have their turn at the mike).

We will come to a point in the future where past practices (museum, musical hall and magazines) criss-cross with emerging ones (file sharing).

Top-down meets bottom-up.

Online games and gaming are taking away revenues from traditional casinos and sport venues.

The desire and drive to share have found a platform ( faster speed of upload.)

Brainstorming technique has been around in Group Communication, but it is stiffling and sterile.

Individual creativity has been around but it works best when not imposed.

In fact, the best contribution from team members comes intrinsically and accidentally.

(see latest Opinion Page in NYT on “the New Group Think”).

Tell all this to century-old bureaucracy (yet Wall Street is known to build colo centers right next to financial center, to gain those mili-second trading advantage. This was to show that speed  works both ways: it takes us up quickly, or down equally quickly e.g. flash crash).

Barnes and Nobles is now betting on its Nook e-readers.

Amazon on digital publishing.

Newsweek and US News and World Reports are focusing on in-depth reportage or University rankings.

I miss Newsweek’s My Turn, but I know it has outlived its time.

Now, we can view instant comments after a post.

Why wait for the editors to select (curate) and show to us?

It’s the age of personal computing, broadband on steroid and fast results at the poll.

Those who are quick to comment will get last-in first-out ranking.

There are ways now to accommodate everyone’s Turn.

In the mirror

Among Dylan’s many memorable lines is “you don’t need the weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blow-in”.

Even without the weatherman, we can feel that things are at a boiling point.

Like in the movie “the Network”, people start to open their windows and bell out “I am mad like Hell, and I won’t take it anymore”.

Except this time, instead of opening their windows, they opened Windows and Adbuster, which called for Occupy Wall Street (and McToilet on Wall Street).

A leaderless protest against figure-less forces that have worked against them e.g. commoditization, globalization, or automation.

Their 60’s counterparts wanted to rage against the status quo.

Conversely, “occupiers of Wall Street” just want to have an occupation that pays a little more than “nickel-and-dime”.

The wind is blowin but not in their favor (Andy Rooney has just retired leaving one vacancy for roughly 2 Billion people who recently joined the rank of the Middle Class).

Instead of “Hell No, We won’t go”, they are now yelling “Hell No, PLace To Go”.

India? China? Brazil?

To land a job in  BRIC‘s countries, one needs a crash course in language and culture.

(I resent the author of a recent Economist’s article, ridiculing “poor English” in Vietnam. Cheap shot at best, and colonialistic at worst.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/09/english-vietnam?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/iamenglishteach

Go ahead and try to learn Mandarin).

Employers look for those with soft-skills that couldn’t be outsourced such as critical thinking, communicative and collaborative skill set across the cultures, but also to pay them at blue collar wages (high skill/low cost) since employers themselves are caught in a competitive race to the bottom due to outsourcing, offshoring and now re-shoring. Damn if you do, damn if you don’t.

Currently a jobs bill which runs at $200,000 per job is on the table.

Foreign students said “No thanks” (even when their HB1 visas were extended) and went home after graduation (BlueSeed is trying to dock a ship out in Seattle Waters to go around this rule).

At first, I thought it was because of the wives (who couldn’t find spices in groceries stores) who pressured their expat husbands to return (let’s stay to India and Singapore) – Japanese executives wouldn’t choose to work here in the US for fear of derailing their career tracks – But, I found it’s more of a pull than push force that they chose not to stay around (follow the money i.e. emerging domestic markets).

In “It used to be us”, the author of “The World is Flat” himself is baffled by his own themes (globalization and IT revolution).

Now, even call centers got automated (outsourcing next level, to automation), so high-value representatives can proactively chat with callers.

We are all caught off- guard: a job loss here, a dead-end career there.

Before we know it, we blame it on Wall Street (partly true, but not the whole picture – the same way India’s service industries and China’s manufacturing industries got the blame for our Lost Decade, or the Japanese lean -semiconductor- manufacturing in the 80’s or the Vietnam War for taking the Johnson’s administration’s eyes of the-Great Society).

But the story is more complicated than that. The solution seems to be multi-pronged because the problem is multi-faced.

Jack Ellul already touched on the idolization of “technique” back in the 60’s. Now, techno-fundamentalism is pervasive in every faced of life (what could be digitized, must be digitized – Larry Page was quoted to say : “let’s have a million engineers” to outrank or outPagerank Microsoft’s 25,000 strong army), forcing “human” to reflect and re-think about what it is that makes them marketable (the human touch, emotional intelligence etc….) in the 21st century.

No wonder we feel short-changed (too many of us chasing too few opportunities at the bottom – even high-paying construction jobs are no longer there on this side of the housing bubble). At the top, one will take a CEO job, like at HP, but for only $1.00.

It reminds me of Newsweek which was acquired also for $1.00).

This Halloween we will be in default costumes, that of homeless men and jobless women (carrying huge luggage, or brief case).

It’s time to revisit Native Americans on the occasion of Columbus Day (to press restart).

It’s time to reinvent  the American Dream. We don’t have to look too far, since the cause and the cure for today’s malaise and misery are right there, in the mirror.

I hope they keep the mirror squeaky-clean there at the McDonald on Wall Street for our protestors’ comfort and convenience.

Boarded up!

The sign says ” ye Bye Austin“, where in the past, one would spot special events such as Book Reading etc… Welcome to UT, Austin campus main strip. Welcome to a new world, online, offline and virtual.

If Borders and Blockbursters could not stem the tide, no independent book chain can.

BTW, with the passing of the Newsweek owner (who had bought the magazine for a token $1.00), the family pledged to continue “bearing the burden” until the Newsweek/Beast returns to profitability.

So much overhyped and many overbuilt strip malls, now seen with For-Lease signs. Meanwhile, Dell is joining others to build Data Centers. With the rate we are going, pretty soon, they will farm it out for people to host corporate servers at home in exchange for rent money (already, advertising companies solicit your cars, then your house, to turn them into stationary or mobile bill boards).

The partition of home and work, private and public, first and second place is blurred. Starbucks provides a so-called Thrid Place during the dot.com boom, only to see it turn into Second place when more people are laid off (BTW, men’s level of employment stands only at 65%, as opposed to 85% during post WW period. The later group got GI Bills, the US’ greatest investment ever). More plants are boarded up to, not just book stores, video stores and strip malls.

My daughter reads herself to sleep every night. The sight of a little girl holding a book just warms my heart. Hate to see it go away.

The love of books. Webster would join in to sing the praise.

To carry today’s tablet is synonymous to carrying a gaming device.

Reading has to compete with other sensory-stimulating distractions e.g. video, music, games, sports, news, e-mail and social media

Of all the places I least suspect independent book stores might close out, would be right off campus.

Yet, I saw it yesterday on my drive by (Borders used to be anchor chain for many malls, now boarded up as well). Entrepreneurs like Branson got his start on campus, selling records (vinyl). Now he has gone on to explore deep seas potential. Bookstore is not a store, but it’s a hub (not smoke filled pub) where minds are challenged and expanded, where Proust, Teilhard de Chardin, Mailer, Wolfe are read . It’s where activists can hand out flyers, and concert promoters tickets. Barnes and Nobles started out with the concept of letting people browse and read freely (puppy-dog sales).

Now this venue is coming to a close (digitization hurts newspaper and print the most, while magazines are still OK e.g US News and World Reports). It brings back sadness and silence, the like of the “day the music dies” when Tower Records closed its door. Ever since, music was still played and listened to, at the gym and on the bus. But it has not been the same: everyone seems to bear his/her own grief and joy privately (Guy Kawasaki I.D this trend, with the ubiquitous I-pod headset).  I understand now the rise of Facebook “Like”. Where else could we go to yell out: hey, listen to this, isn’t it awesome! Or, read this – look at this. Certainly not at the now all boarded up bookstore off campus, where the sign-off says ” ye Bye Austin”.