Tag: Robert Frost

Free mind Free man

If we just sit on the track, pretty soon we will be run over by the oncoming train.

If we just sit and not think at all, we outsource the thinking to others.

Inadvertently, we fall back to the default position, that of inertia.

Or give in to herd mentality, bubble mania, tulip mania and CDO mania.

Cavemen or Centennial men , all have done that. The mass lives in quiet desperation.

But, luckily, there are a few, who are labeled as “outsiders”, rabble-rousers, disruptors or free thinkers.

They “Think Different“.

Even act (or not act) differently.

Just zoom out and take a long view. You will spot them: from medical to material sciences, from the  arts to technology.

These people don’t take “No” for an answer.

They are definitely not into conformity, or safety in numbers.

They don’t follow the “wisdom of crowd” (and definitely wouldn’t stop and look up to the high-rises during one of the experiments on Social Proof).

They chart and map out their own orbits.

To them, between A and B, a straight line is never the shortest. They know the universe and everything that exists is in constant motion, changing and coordinating to achieve entropy.

They might make and listen to music. But never allow themselves to be “boxed” in by the 7 notes, or  restricted bandwidth. (In fact, many apps could have been around back then, but slow data transfer rate and early-stage multiplexing weren’t up to speed ).

Free mind seeks out-of-worldliness. Outliers embrace forward-thinking. Bill Gates himself took the late bus to code on off-hours mainframe. Steve Jobs got transferred to the grave-yard shift etc…

By merely going across the cultures, one can see the relativity of cultural codes.

Or by traveling along the time dimension (just look back to the Wright brothers and their first aerodynamics experiment, or the architectural displays at the Chicago World Fair which marveled attendants with dazzling electricity) helps jump-start our trend-tracking.

Worst case, one can pretend to live a college-student life, when every concept is new and each lecture is challenged.

Albert Einstein puts it well, ” the saddest thing in life is  wasted talent”.

Plan “surprises” into your schedule. Take a side path, the road less traveled, as Robert Frost puts it.

Embrace diversity of opinion, be challenged and changed by them. Taste a variety of foods. Nature is sending out signals for us to decode. Take that plunge into the unknown. Be brave and be alive. For once, think instead of sitting on the track to see if the train will run on schedule. And follow not the crowd,  however large its size. One neuron at a time, start thinking free. And in the process free yourself.

Reaping rewards

Image of an old guy spread out on his Harley w/ a cigar in his mouth stuck with me.

To him, that was it. The end game.

Reaping the windfall.

In Seven Habits of Effective People, Steven Covey urges his readers to “begin with the end in mind”.

I guess, in this case, I better learn how to ride the beast.

(you can keep the cigar).

As a society, we are approaching another end-game: that of a Blade Runner Society,

first in the name of telemedicine, then enters cyber state control armed with speech recognition, facial recognition, Caller ID, individualized embedded chips, behavioral search …..to make possible convergence (of service and product brokerage).

A return to Eden. The Holy Grail of SuperMart in the Cloud.  A return to the original Amazon via the online Amazon.  Time saving. Money saving. Energy saving (most eerie when a company in Japan mandates its employees to get the same hair cut, to save energy e.g. hair dryer and water).

Cutting through the chase. No long sales cycle.

Just closing.

The B2B apps watered down version for consumer use.

Touch screen mobile phones, on all phones.

Commerce used to be a person-to-person transaction (begins and ends with a hand shake).

Then, with prosumer movement, we gave birth to a self-help and self-serve society.

Now, we are volunteering our data (and eventually, our medical data) to save ourselves (some counties already have citizens uploaded their personal data like where the bedrooms are, the medical records etc… for first responders’ rapid response).

The arrival of self-revealing society will not be greeted without a fight.

With help from Harrison-Ford– type, heroes of the resistance.

Preferably, French, with his beret and gilet.

Studies have shown that we prefer filling out a form, online or on paper, as opposed to revealing intimate personal details (like Social Security) to strangers. Yet, it’s a stranger who will have access to those data eventually (cyber-verify), be it a naked picture, or our “Likes” on Facebook.

Throughout these pages, I have stage-managed my digital footprints to pre-empt data distortion.

As long as we can still choose, originate and leave out any content then we are still in control. Google 1+ can aggregate our social graph to connect the dots, but it cannot pin down thoughts I chose to leave out, or sites I refused to click on.

The future of privacy belongs to those who choose what not to reveal.

Virtually, we are right back to the gated houses on Long Island. The mansion in Pakistan.

And the New England white fences.

Companies that respect consumer’s secrecy and sacredness win.

To reap future rewards, Harley and Cuban cigars, one needs to respect the man-2-man transaction,

just like it’s been done on the Silk Road. Technology only hastens that which one already chose as modus operandi. No wonder they said emerging countries tend to adopt telemedicine more quickly. India, meanwhile, hastens a national ID project to facilitate banking and social services.

By leapfrogging to the  bio-metric space, India inadvertently is building its cyyber-infrastructure,

like China with its physical one. The things they built were dictated by necessity

as much as availability (of latest tech). We are all in the race to reap the rewards, Blade runner style.

The road most traveled

Fireplace (fake or real), Christmas tree (fake or real) and toy boxes (stuffed or life-sized), all

put together to create a Hollywood home version of  White Christmas, the illusion that we are OK and what-and-how-much we charged at the registers won’t haunt us in late January.

In America, the road most traveled has been to the retail outlets. I live near a Costco.

And by sheer size of traffic leading to the store, I can read the health of the economy. When it comes to the economy, I am a bush man, unable to verify “supply side” from “trickle-down” economy.

There is a PBS documentary showing Americans in Paris during the 20’s.

Some say they came because of the Prohibition at home. Others say it was because the War exposed these young men to a wider (and wilder) world.

Whatever the case may be, more Americans have stayed home to watch others arriving at their shores  since WW II. Then, the latest census shows a decline in new arrivals.

Gas price increases not because of increased consumption in the US, but because of BRIC‘s nations.

For the first time, Americans feel the pinch not caused by domestic factors. Yes, we have been blamed for over consumption that brought up the level of carbon emission. But, lately, carbon emission have caused by high rises in Dubai and Eastern China.

Cars have been downsized in the US (Fiesta, forever), and refrigerators for dorm room from China are selling like hot cakes. I keep seeing people buying bikes at Wal-Mart.

Baby-boomer’s life-style trend. But the solution is still the same: shopping for items, large or small.

When we prepare for emergencies like Y2K, we went shopping. When we are celebrating Christmas, we go shopping.

When the economy is down, or right after 9/11, the President called on all Americans to go shopping. Robert Frost wouldn’t comment on the current state of affairs, since he must be the only one who took the road less traveled.

His other most quoted line “fence makes good neighbors”. Solitude and austerity don’t cut it . It’s a nation favors the road most traveled. When the road took an unfavorable turn, the youth went somewhere else. Twice in recent memories, they either went to Paris (Prohibition period) or Canada (during the Vietnam era) in protest.

Can you imagine everywhere you go, you run into the same people (let’s say, seeing all your friends in Ha Long Bay over Tet).  Or worst, at Costco while waiting in line paying for fake trees, fake boxes and fake firewood.

“Two roads diverged in a wood…I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” The other, most traveled, has a huge billboard which urges you to “shop for things you don’t need, with the money you don’t have, to impress people you don’t like”.

 

Time to change

Change bears a different connotation to different people.

In the 60’s, change threatened the status quo (Hell No, we won’t go).

It’s inevitable that we need to adapt (from jukebox to boombox, from paper-back book to e-book).  A few years from now, we would rather be dead than getting caught carrying  a hard-back book (today’s equivalence of carrying a brick phone w/pull-out antenna).

In fact, leadership is all about change management: take R or L at the fork in the road (yahoo)

take both (Cisco), or take the one less traveled (Robert Frost).

Change has been equated with letting go. But it’s not. It’s being adaptive and relevant.

Downgrading, downshifting, downsizing and retrenching.

The exact reversal of the 80’s “trading up”.

In the Hummer and the Mini, the author tries to point out the paradox in taste and style. At the present time, we might have to do away with Hummers altogether

(have you noticed gas prices lately).

And there is forced change e.g. aging, empty nesting or season change whose cold front disrupts our holiday travel. Here in Florida, they use helicopters to bring down warmer temperature to protect crops (same technology was used during the Vietnam War to spray Agent Orange to destroy crops).

The positive side of aging is maturity. Having been there and done that, one detects a familiar pattern (deja vu) and can easily connect the dots (for instance, Haiti and Vietnam both had some French influence. This makes easy for the Vietel engineers to connect with locals while trying to rebuild Haitian telecom infrastructure.)

Unfortunately, the path of least resistance is often the path most taken. It saves time when everything is in place, the same place (efficiency model). Have you noticed that as creatures of habits, we always congregate around the fire-place (or TV, its modern-day replacement) and water cooler at work (or the conference-room speaker phone). But that’s our pre-Google false sense of comfort.

Now that the transformation to digital is almost complete, we must embrace minimalist life style (watch out Good Will and Salvation Army, you will have to expand your warehouses).  Digital natives will not give a second thought (since they are not attached to things non-digital) before junking that jukebox or that Polaroid.

We are change managers. And managers must decide what’s important and what’s urgent, what stays and what goes. Most importantly, from future vantage point looking back, will today’s decision hold? Are we being self-disruptive enough or face forced change?

The more we want to stay the same, the more we will have to change. Or just sit there and get run over by the train.

And that time is now.