Tag: Steve Jobs

Past lives

Alpha-Omega or reincarnation?

Steve Jobs didn’t believe all those talents would disappear in a flash.

Many here in Asia believe the same.

Hypnotism brings back deep-seated memories in the brain, recalling multiple past lives .

Duyen No.

L’amour and Debt.

No coincidence.

Just virtuous or vicious cycle.

Spin it baby.

Make your choices. Think you are in control?

I know I have my parents’ gene pool.

My kids are partly mine and their moms’.

So on so forth.

Today Vietnam celebrates its Founding King.

Thoughtfulness and simplicity. Banh day Banh chung.

Round and Square, rice and beans, the Earth and the Moon.

Harmony. Peace. And Stability.

Being a small country, Vietnam has to fend of invaders with whatever comes handy.

Giac den nha dan ba phai danh (when attacked, women take up arms).

Then peace time. Farewell to arms. Welcome L’Oreal, Louis Vuitton and Lauren.

Just don’t assume. Behind the make-ups lies strength and subtlety.

Hai Ba Trung. Ba Trieu.

Don’t mess with them.

Just smile, sweat and sorrow.

Fight on. Firm up your footing.

Turf and territorial protection.

This land is our land.

Shinning seas and dusty hills.

Fight on.

Then come home to simplicity, sweat and smile.

Alpha-Omega? No.

Next lives. Non-stop. Live on. Pay forward and pay backward.

Waste not your time. But then, time is always on your side. At least, here, in Vietnam.

For thousand of years people celebrate simplicity, harmony and subtlety. Gio To. Gio Cha. Gio Chong.

The self is not celebrated. It’s communal. It’s trans-generational. It’s eternal and cyclical. Forever bound in an unbroken chain of melody and harmony. Sounds like a chant, sounds like music. Sounds like Holiday. Sounds playful. Zen-ful.

Mojo memory

Like muscle memory, our mojo could come back if we know how to flex it. Self-reinvention. Press reset.

Peak again. Brace for it.

Noose’s head. Winning.

It’s hard work and threatening to ride the wave once again.

Many would rather take the path of least resistance. Play it safe.

But the world is crying out for leadership. True North.

You don’t manage people. You lead them.

You manage time and money. But people are multidimensional.

How can you apply a cookie approach to a bunch of unique people?

By being one. An authentic one that is.

The end of all learning is to know yourself, your style and your SWOT.

Build a team to complement one another.

Get the mojo back.

Quick.

We are way pass talking.

Just do it.

Inertia has killed all of us. Death is in no special hurry.

We will end up doing ourselves in.

Except for those who saw this coming (Steve Jobs was one).

Clapton saw his child fall to his death (Tears in Heaven).

Now he got a million-dollar car.

Wonderful tonight.

Mojo back.

Remember your glory?

Blood, sweat and tears?

Been there done that?

How about now?

Can you pull the rabbit out of the hat once again?

The world needs leaders. Authentic ones.

Hard to find. Like quality. You recognize it when you see it.

Like muscle memory, you can feel it when it returns.

Like home sweet home, you can smell mom’s cooking.

The sweet taste of success, of rewards for accomplishment.

But until then, lead on. Start with yourself. Back to basics.

Block and punch. Kick that kick a thousand times.

10,000 hours of mastery.

Leadership is a skill set. But it’s a learned art.

Everybody recognizes a leader. You know the presence, the charisma, the passion, the fire, and the influence. Contagious influence. Let’s connect. Let’s get the mojo back. Wake it up. It will come back on reflex.

 

Start seeing

In two weeks, I am up for new pair of eye glasses.

But today, upon first examination, the eye care doctor revealed what was obvious to her, but not to me: I have had a minor stroke (vein # 7), which pulled my left eye up

and if I were able to ask someone to watch me while I am asleep, he/she would see that it’s not completely shut.

Hence, the dried eye and the need for artificial tears (contact lenses for the past thirty years).

I could have died five years ago while fainted and fell down.

Now, reflecting and meditating on that near-death experience, I realize I have not focused while living on borrow time.

Steve Jobs was known to pay attention to how an I-phone was packaged and shipped. User’s experience was important to him just as the original design itself. The Devil is in the details.

Yet, all along, he had known about the cancer that was eating him up.

Start seeing!

Start making choices!

Start focusing .

Mozart Requiem, working backward from your visualized funeral.

That face, those fingers, the lips and those eyes.

We all die, not being able to see our own faces (only their reflections).

I want to start my memorial museum: stuff I wrote, things I said, people I hurt and loved, people who hurt me and loved me. (In “the Museum of Innocence”, our protagonist even collected what his lover would call trash, to be displayed in his personal museum. He predicted that in the future, museums will get to be very personal, more intimate than boutique ones.)

Circumstances I could have acted more bravely and opportunities I could have had a better jump on.

Emptying out my desk, emptying out my shell. Shed the pretense and nearsightedness.

This is me.

This is how I see you.

Unfiltered and with suspense of disbelief.

I see your inner and hidden beauty. Your perpetual struggle and sabotage.

We are all injured creatures, by life, and subliminally by death.

I know I have.

Have you?

Death reaches back with its long arms, its odious toxicity and sure-handed destruction.

Death separates us, unless we all end at once in a calamity.

Because of the fear of Death we became overly self-protective.

We put up a shell, a  shield. We want to buy ourselves some time.

We want to live in denial like Twin Towers’ jumpers buying a few more seconds.

I couldn’t for the life of me understand what happened to me until today.

It was a wake-up call. I felt lucky. I still have another shot at life.

I want to add to my new eye prescription an added dimension, a new context, a different angle and a zoom-out capability. I want to feel the bond of common humanity i.e. struggle to get home in the smog, to put food on the table and to put the children to bed. I want to  see the child’s future and possibilities.

Try it yourself this very day. Take public transportation for a change, and observe. People-watching. Start seeing.

Play element

We seem to have lost touch with the play aspect in life and work.

I am thinking of John Lennon and Steve Jobs at the moment.

Both pursued their passion, and both were dead.

One married interracially, the other just loved all things simple (even foods).

They were famous, and still are, although they could not take that with them.

Their legacy is huge. Just listen to #9 Dream on the I-pod.

Sit back and have a siesta.

Then you’ll know what I mean.

How can someone who sang about dream but brought us so much life!

Could it be that life is all illusion? Then within an illusion we can still dream up another?

I was at my best when company’s culture encourages creativity, collaboration and tons of energy.

When it’s a chore, we lost the play element.

Conversely, when it’s play, it’s no longer a chore.

To serve with gladness.

Love those we interact with. Just love them first, as a person, then our service to their need will be an extension of that human connection.

You can tell when a singer just sings for the money. To him/her, it’s just a gig. He/she faked the emotion.

But once in a while, we feel sad or lonely, or abandoned. then a song seems to voice our feelings.

Then we  got a hit. It’s a hot night. The heart feels glad. There is vibration, that feeling of being alive and realizing it at the same time.

No Play, the world see only zombies and walking dead.

Dream on. And on and on. Jobs did not believe in the off switch.

Time, on whose side?

Just like an old-time movie, friends met yesterday to rehash.

We mentioned briefly the passing away of our friend’s brother: nerdy, good old boy and an ATM machine service man and family man. In short, the least likely candidate to die young. Yet, he had been long gone (by now 3 years).

Earth, Wind and Fire used to have a song out called “Time is on your side”.

I don’t think so.

One can conjure up various scenarios for end-of-life, but it will end regardless, without credits roll (perhaps we should get going with our acknowledgement page just in case).

Feature-length movies, by convention, last one hour and a half (same way Twitter limits a tweet to 140 characters).

Except for Costner’s and Cameron’s (Dancing with Wolves and Titanic).

Life happens while we are busy planning it (John Lennon).

It came concurrently and not sequentially:  a brief sunset, a nagging child, a teacher’s stern look.

One can find happiness in confinement (Life is Beautiful) or at the last moment (Mozart’s Requiem).

It’s not over until it is truly over

When I was 4 or 5 years old, I saw neighbors carry out a dead man .

He had lived alone in a house in the alley.

I did not know his name. Only learned later that he had died without any relatives around him.

By all measures (culturally), he died unhappily.

He could have lived twice his age then, but his death was still viewed as an unhappy one. Quality trumps quantity.

Biotech has extended our “feature-length” narrative, from one-hour-and-a-half lifescript to that of Titanic’s and Dancing with Wolves’.

What are we going to do with all those extra hours? Amusing ourselves to death while waiting for death (there hasn’t been a playbook for seniors – Paterno for instance has just passed away at 85 after getting sacked by the BOD at my school).

In Silicon Valley where Steve Jobs started out, the motto was “trust no one above 30”.

Yet, Sculley and other investment banking CEO’s pocketed huge severance despite their poor performance.

Time is on whose side?

Of course not on the side of the poor or the pure of hearts (keep the faith).

Even with director’s cut, a feature-length film still needs to be trimmed down.

As creatures of selective memories, we often edit out and reinvent our past.

Nowhere else can you find serious anticipation of the new and relinquishing of the past than in Vietnam, during Tet.

The Year of the Dragon has finally arrived. It roars, dances and puffs out fire.

We invent myths and matiarials to redefine who we are (he is from a Royal breed, a Lexus owner).

Vietnamese people  are known as descendants of Dragon and Angel. To understand Vietnam, you need to understand its literary life.

Vietnamese  honors duty above death, sacrifice above love. These tales of heroism are the baseline. “Time is on whose side” is an irrelevant question. Happiness defined as personal fulfillment is also out of the question. People here see themselves as in transit, with Earth another station along the way. Home is where ancestors are waiting, provided you had fulfilled your filial obligation and honored them by courageous living. Try to work that in the State of the Union address, and see its impact on American society? (You lied!). On the CEO’s on Wall Street. On the armed men who preyed on US campus.

America needs Vietnam as much as Vietnam needs America, since time is on neither side.

Watching Victor Vu’s film

The Coke, (pop) corn and cinema.

Heroes of Destiny.

Boom, bang! karate kid! Justified violence (revenge).

Boy meets girl, boy almost loses girl, boy gets girl in the end. Happy Ending.

When the bewitched Empress released her grip, she broke the chain of self-perpetuated violence.

It’s like cutting the credit card when you  are a shopaholic.

Blood-thirsting regime shed more blood to solidify power (the East was used to “Chu Di Tam Toc” i.e. wipe out the enemy’s descendants down to the third generation.)

We got some humor and and we got the resolution (breaking the chain).

As Vietnam‘s m0vie-going is improved, so has its film industry.

More investors and actors take a plunge, as barriers to entry are much lower than in Hollywood.

Valentine should see another date movie (the horror genre): House in the Alley.

My cousin used to work in Vietnam’s film industry. We used to get invited to premiers at Rex cinema.

Back then, actors all lined up to greet guests on the red carpet.

We had our own version of Brigitte Bardot (without Jean Paul Belmondo) in Tham Thuy Hang, and many generations of comedian. Still, the industry was in its infancy. By the time it matured, technology has moved on to home theatres and small screens.

It’s an act of love and faith to plunge deep into movie making in Vietnam.

I admire the efforts such as Norwegian Wood.

You can’t get a flatter world than that: Beatles’ title, Japanese novel, Vietnamese mis-en-scene talent.

Victor Vu started out with horror genre, then moved on to action flicks.

He used Matrix and X-men special effects throughout his work.

But definitely, you know it’s a Vietnamese story: Nguyen Trai‘s sole surviving descendant seeking revenge and restoration to the family’s name.

Part philosophy, part action (but not mindless); settling then stirring.

It’s entertaining, but not surprising.

What surprised me was the setting (Parkson) and the friendly greeting when we exited the premise. In the States, you are lucky if they show you out to the right exit.

I hope producers and directors find strong materials and backing to ride the waves of change (low barriers of entry, yet declining ticket sales). I know we have yet told stories like the Fall of Saigon, Last Men Out, and A Day in the life (of successful Vietnamese immigrants). Before you know it, the digital generation is taking over, with fuzzy memories of how they have come to be who they are, with Ipad and Iphone.

No wonder why Steve Jobs commissioned his biography, “so my kids understand what I was doing”. Il’etait une fois……Once upon a time…..Everybody loves a good bed-time story, well-crafted and well- told. Victor Vu’s that I saw today luckily did not put me to sleep.

Jobs’ off switch

Steve Jobs hated the on-off  switch. Perhaps more so because it was a relic of electricity (Edison) and automobile manufacturers (Ford). He did not like old wine in the same wineskin, given our always-on Cloud Service in  A/C data centers.

Apple chose North Carolina as a site to store music, video and the rest of its customers’ files. The FCC recently allowed the roll-out of White Space, wi-fi on steroid, also in NC.

Who needs the on/off switch! It had some utilitarian legacy (activate and deactivate) when hardware used to rule.

Now, software eats your lunch.

Of BMW’s  thousand components, a large portion are software-controlled. From Buggy to Beamer, the engineers have made a giant leap.

Jobs was quoted as saying (this was counter-intuitive and anti-academic):

“if Ford had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said,

faster buggies”.  In short, it’s categorically different with revolutionaries.

Think different!

No on/off switch.

Just the dial.

Circular motion.

The experience economy.

Control the product from end-to-end to make every touchpoint with the customer an iSee! (Disneyland).

Progress , like time, waits for no man.

If you keep standing on the track, you will likely get run over.

Not a single word in Jobs biography states directly that he was a  futurist. Yet he could intuitively sense what was coming – his biography itself was well orchestrated (momenti mori) and ironically open-sourced (counter-culture life style, but proprietary business model).

In fact, religious zealots did take a shot at him for his views.

I wonder if those people secretly borrow an I-pad from friends to touch and feel (where is the on/off switch?).

I wonder what their legacies are as opposed to Jobs’?

And their destination : paradise or purgatory?

Jobs took his son to a business meeting (antennaeGate) mostly for I-phone IV damage control . “It would be a two-year worth of Business School  education” said he.

His biography, which offers more than a two-year worth of B-school, is a must-read for technologists, marketers and culture critics who want to understand the Valley ethos.

When arts (music in this case) found new venue (I-pod) and revenue (I-Tunes), it is unchained melody for the mass (unbundled as singles not whole album).

Be spoiled with IT 3.0 (cloud and social media) but also be thankful sitting on giants’ shoulders

An image evokes in my mind was that of Cinema Paradiso, where the kid got a ride home on the bike’s frame, wearing his mentor’s hat and chatting up as a fee for the ride. However long, enjoy the ride. That’s our reward . As Southwest Airlines would say, please collect your items to ensure faster turn-around at the gate.

Less is more

In reading Steve Jobs, a theme keeps emerge: less is more.

He cut out the fat and all its distraction.

(being a veggie, he stayed true to form).

His closet was full of the same long-sleeve stretch shirt that defined his personal brand.

His take on wealth and money was also consistent with his 60’s philosophy.

Steve could be nice when he chose to, but working for him must have been a nightmare.

His current replacement was quoted as saying “someone must take charge and fix the problem in China i.e. suppliers”. Half an hour later, he turned to see the man in charge still sitting there “why are you still here?”. That man drove to SF airport and bought a ticket flying East.

It’s true that our world is better and certainly more beautiful with technologists like Steve who also doubled as art lovers (I-pod).

If life consists of only 0’s and 1’s, we would all be automatons.

Lucky for us, we got both Bohr and Beethoven, Newton and Nicholas Cage.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Yet people keep acquiring, acquiring, acquiring.

And the longer I live, the more I see this isn’t going to end.

The pursuit of happiness has meant the pursuit of things (think of exercising equipment for home you saw on night TV).

All I can recall from a Hermeneutic class was “a priori “(we read into a text what we had already thought it would say).  We have consitently misinterpreted the meaning of happiness. In fact, advertisers have done this for us (driving a Cadillac is cool. Hence, to be cool, you must own a Cadillac).

Those text-book writers managed to make complex something very simple.

Urban gangs could say “yo man, m..f…is a racist”. That would say it all.

In the age of Wikipedia, if we want to go in-depth about a topic, just click it and scroll down. The spread of information will multiply even more quickly than Gordon Moore had anticipated (IBM has found a way to save space in transistors, call it magnetization, as opposed to polarization as traditionally used). Devices will get smaller with longer battery life (Acer’s thinnest laptop).

But convenience and comfort don’t equate to happiness. Life has gone on for centuries unassisted by today’s accessories. A tribe in India (island) is still functioning without modern amenities. (Tourists tried to bribe them to “pole dance” for YouTube , raising the issue of “human zoo”.)

The happy countries index often lists Costa Rica and other S American countries.

Yes, quality of life index listed Scandanavian countries such as Norway and Finland. They got the oil, but equally distributed unlike Lybia. But happiness doesn’t confine to just Costa Rica as opposed to Costa Mesa (where South Coast Plaza Mall is located). Perhaps Steve saw something while living in India (My Sweet Lord).

Perhaps we too should reexamine what are the core things that make us happy.

Beauty is found in wild lilies and the grandest scene recurs at every sunset.

Sometimes we missed those moments of happiness, only to recognize them after the fact. Would it be simpler to give happiness the initiative to seek us out. I bet you it work out better that way.

Oil-and-water economies

David Brooks of the NYTimes had a piece about the US economy which he coined as “mid-life-crisis economy that needs  to be rejuvenated”.

That’s oil.

Here in Vietnam, I found quite a contrast.

Young demographic, young economy that goes no where but up.

Community Colleges, Trade and Vocational schools, English classes.

One by one, they will progress to the next tier: married, having children, house-hunting and interior furnishing.

The accumulation game: he who dies with the most stuff wins.

People used to be content with three meals a day and a scooter parked in the house.

Then came the phone, the Ipad and the I-pod.

All of a sudden, expectations rise.

A new holiday ring tone, a remote for the scooter alarm, a new app for the I-pad.

Big-box supermarkets are gearing to push consumption pass their “valley of death” (early adopters seem to have done all the shopping they could besides taking trips to Singapore and Australia).

The early and late majority still bond with traditional outdoor venues: bartering is still common, but slowly it is being phased out.

One lighter note during Christmas: the meat-stall ladies up North uploaded their spontaneous dance number onto YouTube.

I can picture them with cell phones urging a quick delivery, but  they are now going “social” and “visual”.

Vietnam got started 40 years ago with Kennedy’s reluctant but pushed-ahead with that fateful decision to engage.

This has set the country back (while Steve  Jobs and Steve Wozniak grew up and toyed with personal computers in their garage).

Now it needs to play catch-up (while taming inflation). A dance that needs skills.

In war, the two sides already seemed to act like oil and water.

Now in peace , the two economies couldn’t be more different: one needs rejuvenation (per Brooks), the other revision.

Strange sounds, familiar shores

Instead of “I woke up to the sound of music, Mother Mary comes to me…” like Paul McCartney,

I woke up to strange sounds these days: peddlers who use “low tech” au parleur (bull horn) mounted on bicycles or tri-cycles (selling boot-legged CD‘s). In fact, it was my first time got chased by pleasant sound from behind (most of the time, it was emergency vehicle with a sense of urgency). By music here, I mean, not Beatles‘, but Slow Rock (nhac Sen), lamenting heart ache and heart-break.

In the evening, you can hear metal belt sound for in-home massage ( I have never tried).

I miss those wood-on-wood sound of a noodle peddler.

Those were the best snacks a boy could wish for. Speaking of Vietnam childhood and music.

Steve Jobs and friends were listening to music with headsets so they could do it while laying down.

One of his signature photos was an empty room with just a lamp, with him sitting cross-legged.

Very Zen-like. Minimalist. Pure simplicity in design.

He went on to take classes in calligraphy (even Reed College curriculum was still too restrictive for his type).

The sum of all these experience gave us the I-pod with ear-plugs, and later on the I-phone and I-pad.

Studies mentioned that babies could hear before birth.

If this is true, I must have heard an early scooter, a vendor on wheels, someone trying to get the grill going, or a rooster announcing a new day.

Dawn in Vietnam and dusk in the US. (You can experience similar feel, let’s say by traveling down Mexico, but then they got the same time zone as in the US).

Sharing the same Moon.

Sharing the same hope, fear and dream:

Will my kids grow up “con nha lanh” (teachable), and not into drugs.

Will they stay or leave for strange shores?

Will they listen to our voice, those familiar sounds, or they will just “follow the money” and “hearing voices”.

In the end, especially in our flat world, the sound of jet engine and popping soda cans will bring us home from any strange shore.

For a moment there at my friend’s party, we danced and jumped to a familiar tune (sound), felt our hearts go on beating (The End of the World) and saddened “when you say, ‘goodbye'”. The day can’t go wrong when you “get up to the sound of music”, let’s say in “Beautiful Sunday” (when you said, you love me, hey, hey, it’s a beautiful day). Or at night, when soothing sound you first heard while inside Mummy’s womb was that of the noodle man’s peddling.