Tag: Nobel Prize

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.

Neither East Nor West

Orhan Pamuk must be born of “Other Colors” and in the “Snow” who later built his “Museum of Innocence“.

He got the Nobel Prize for his unique perspective and perception on being in the middle of things: Istanbul.

Pamuk invited us back to his childhood, to view changes through a child’s eyes “when we watched the film, up to the part where

Abraham loved God so much without expecting anything in return, we all cried…then when the lamb suddenly appeared out of nowhere to stand in for his only son, …we busted out in tears” (Museum of Innocence).

In Snow, his character was a journalist who investigated why veiled women went on a suicide binge.

We were invited into the inner sanctum of a mysterious culture, an exclusive club.

There, we learned that they laughed, cried, went to theatre or appeared in play.

The West can learn something and so does the East.

Pamuk truly serves as a hyphen to both worlds.

He inadvertently takes up an ambassadorial role for our new globalized world.

In our broadband world, the speed and spread of information has no longer been an issue.

But information often times don’t equate with knowledge or cross-cultural sensitivity.

Until we enter our customer’s world, with all its habits and behavior.

When Vietnam was partitioned back in 1954, 2 Million North Vietnamese migrated South in “tau ha mom” (French carriers left over from D-day). The majority of them settled near Vung Tau, Bien Hoa and Ban Co.

I was born there at the last stop. Being Northerner inside the house, and Southerner outside, I grew up aware of the subtlety of sub-cultures as they came into contact or even collision.

Later, in America, I seeked out classmates from Ghana, Singapore, Taiwan, Netherland, Argentina …to ask questions, to hear their world views.

Thirty years ago, the issues were information flow (North-South).  Now that Korea and to a certain extent, Vietnam, all got access to broadband and I-phones. The results: South-South lateral flow e.g. Korean soap programing.

Vietnamese companies, meanwhile, are trying to export themselves, from tangible products (rice, garment, cashews and coffee) to intangible products (outsourcing and software testing service.)

Those who enter and embrace customers’ world will win the day.

Those who don’t, won’t.

It took me a while to register Pamuk’s name, the same way North American did with names like “Nguyen”.

But once the lights are dimmed, and you took on the character’s role (suspension of disbelief), you became a “universal” Turk with his hopes, fears and dreams.

Pamuk’s signature is his remembrance of childhood in all its particularity and his negotiating/reconciling East-West identities.

He did not floss over the details. He paid attention to them.

Because of this, he earned our trust and established himself as an observer and author.

He made the mundane his most cherished.

Because of Pamuk, I will never look at the Turks the same way (as friends rather than foreigners).

It’s as if I got new lenses to view the world, from his point of view,  as neither East nor West; just global citizenry who struggle and savor their dreams, exterior and interior.

The problem with our material-centered world is that we focus on the outside and observable at the expense of the inner beauty.

He is no fool to lose that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose. This is true from Abraham on down to today.

Load balancing

A few years back, we got headlines like “women made strides with Nobel prizes“.

And I remember hearing our shared winner of Economics said she studied ways which societies managed to share work load,

from fisheries to farming. I assumed she was trying to crack the “non-zero sum” code, or something similar to

Network Theory (how we are most affected by “weaker ties”, a few degrees of separation away from us).

The speed of microprocessors has ushered in nothing short of an information/knowledge revolution.

Essentially, each of us serves as a “node” in our social connectedness.

Back in my sales days, we treated these “nodes” as “sales leads” or “warm calls”.

Whether their influence is positive or negative, they influence nevertheless.

( I remembered for instance one real estate guy who did not like watermelon with seeds, or my former boss who enjoys yoga and sushi).

Our social memory, only to be referred to or occasionally resurfaced as our own, idiocy or idiosyncrasy, constantly gets its supply from myriads of stimuli (new book title, another  headline, latest franchise movie like Fast and Furious or Friday the 13th).

Back to our headline. When I grew up, I admired names like Marie Curie and Marilyn Monroe (I did know that one was French, and the other American, and how far apart they were, spectrum wise: science vs the arts).

Now, I remember Avon and Ebay former CEO’s  (now HP’s).

And I remember my mom, the greatest multi-tasker I have ever known: teacher, mother, wife, cook and great relative to a very large extended family. She managed it all, earning her French teaching credential during that colonial era, to eventually pass away gracefully in a West Virginian nursing home. Her secret: putting herself last. Servant leadership.

Teaching load, laundry load, and household-budget. Women are better at multi-tasking than men (Maria Shriver, one of the Kennedys, was caught on tape yapping away on a cell phone, against CA law). Microprocessing speed and fat pipe will only accelerate the process (of helping women make greater strides, in all spheres).

I would add telecommuting as a great enhancer of load balancing. And a quiet Maytag also helps.

Next studies on collaboration should incorporate machines into the mix. Imagine how fast it could have been had those first Honeywell computers (actually appliances) been sold well. It still doesn’t lessen the burden of a traveling executive, male or female. But then, that’s where out social networking comes in to complete the transformation of the Third Wave, which has swept away both Marie Curie and Marilyn Monroe, leaving only Madame Secretary in its wake (as of this edit, it’s now J. Kerry).