The price of freedom is shown through the cost or loss calculated of gaining that freedom, as if that once obtain, freedom is a glorious outcome where everyone mutually benefits without any downsides or cost. But the price of freedom, to either have or to maintain it, has a price all its own that is rarely discussed or even known.

The price after freedom, is a system where meritocracy generally takes over. Where products and services often find success through influences of markets and celebrity status, where some rules are bent to game the system, and where freedoms often will generally come with some negative consequences by the yinyang of freedom.

But even if this system, on the surface, generally appears to be unfair to many, the positive aspects to freedom does have more benefits to society than costs. For one, it will generally punish bad actors, innovation and merit generally wins over mediocrity and an accepted fair rule book and somewhat level playing field is established in this environment.

As with any system or organization within, there is constant work needed to improve the system of freedom. To make it freer, fairer and more beneficial to all that can participate, that as a society or even a business community can work on 'truly fair' as the ultimate outcome of freedom.

Freedom is one that takes very hard work to maintain, because it comes at the cost of sacrifice and work by everyone inside the system to continue its success and evolution towards the freer and fairer society. To build relationships and understanding with each other, to work together through common goals and objectives, to see everyone, regardless of who they are, as human beings with unique wishes, thoughts, goals and contributions that all contribute to the freedom experience.

Force is usually applied to freedom, at minimum, to establish and out-of-bounds markers so that freedom itself, doesn’t runs wildly away and descends into chaos where no rules apply. Freedom is very delicate though, so too much force and it gets suppressed where rules upon rules are applied to move or change the game and playing field for the benefit of one over the other and it becomes nothing more than kingmaker and back to oppression.

Freedom must be viewed as a referee. It is there to call the rules and make sure that everyone plays fairly, but this referee cannot itself call all the shots, play calls, and unearned scores of the game nor can it just walk off the field leaving the game all together. The price of freedom is one to keep in mind that there is a shared cost of livening in, keeping and maintaining freedom and that resided in a very narrow band in its most fair form, and on the outside of that is a cost of a suffering world. 

Insurance itself, is a basically a pooled collection of policies to spread risk for a low probability event. The cost of death, however, is high. Not just factoring in future earning potential that will never be realized for beneficiaries that are dependent, but the fact that medical events, either by old age, illness from diseases, or catastrophic injury can result of that individual depleting savings, with some reports showing 80% of retirement saving depleted in the last 6-months of life. This often leaves beneficiaries with nothing or very little.

The value of a human life, for most people, is beyond the economic value, but that of compassion and love from others of that human being. Love ones will often say that life should have no cost, and every resource and help from others must be poured in to help one human being to live if possible. There is a large portion of global society, that there is no insurance on a human life, nor the means for any support of beneficiary or probate. Death happens every second somewhere in the world, and many will die alone or without anything to leave behind.

They say every human being will experience three deaths. 1) When you physically die. 2) When they either bury or cremated your corpse. 3) When no one is left around to remember you or speak of your name. But most of the current generations living today, all bear a deep compassion for human beings, and a deep desire to keep everyone alive, regardless of circumstances, place or time. So how can we balance the cost of a human life verses the cost of resources to keep everyone alive as long as possible, especially since we will all be forgotten by time eventually. 

Think of this as stair steps analogy of evolution biology. This isn’t a theory to explain away the gaps of the fossil record but the way molecularly how things work and how slowly a beneficial gene mutation must go through to catch on to the wider population of the species. One of the most profound discoveries in evolutionary biology is that many genes that we posses and express has no real benefits to fitness or anything else that is considered an advantage trait, but fillers that get stuffed in between that is just there as fillers, much like a pillow and the stuffing inside.

This had me thinking that long periods of very slow change or stasis, may in fact, not really be a very bad thing. If it works for the earth and species over time, then it’s possible that long periods of stasis could in fact be beneficial. A period of stabilization and status quo is very common occurrences in business and personally, though a much shorter time period than evolutionary time frame, but none the less the same if scaled.

We often fill the time with nothing, but fillers of leisure and idleness and months and years pass without much or any change, but these are the times that we experience the most and is what is common. To accept this as normal is not a just a way to cop out and tune out of your goals, but an understanding that hyper periods are short lived, and stasis is what takes place most of the time. Accept stasis but be prepared for the hyper period of change that will come.

A person’s main pain can be physical, physiological or emotional, but it’s best described as whatever stresses is placed upon that individual that it causes major disruption to their productive lives. The one that trends to the top in a lot of individuals is fear.

Fear of the future, fear of death, fear of others, fear of the past, fear of the unknown, fear of all kinds. This tends to manifest itself in individuals in different ways when we experience a collective experience together. It is fascinating to see the differences of how one chooses to apply their fear in a pandemic, because there is a clear demarcation of those fears that goes in different directions.

The problem is that we often use fear to project our irrational behaviors or responses on others. Because we feel that they are not understanding or insensitive to our own position. This causes a theater curtain to fall and block conversations and a lost of personal connection.

That is why people tend to group together within the same ideology, faith, traditions, customs and beliefs. It is much easier to connect to people you can communicate your pain with when they return the same awareness or relation your pain instead of criticizing or mocking it.

Since we are all not the same and we all do not share the same main pain, we have chosen to cope with this idiosyncrasy by staying in tribes. There seems to be rare peacemakers that can communicate and bring together warring tribes from time to time, but it’s rare and if you are one. We need you!

Some qualified, some not so much. Some have large megaphones while others have narrow-minded agendas veering more political and ideological than anything else. Trying to steer your starship mind towards something more attuned to the factual truth is a brutal and damaging journey.

Most of the time we just really don’t know. We haven’t expanded our knowledge and know-how past the asteroid belt and forever stuck in a mindless orbit of our own trapped mind. There is, however, some hope. A spark to charge the rockets to fire up, because we see something beyond the belt. A glowing comet streaking quickly across the sky, with its own path and journey that takes it else where to another galaxy. These rare comets are the quiet experts that the masses never heard of nor probably care, because they speak a different language. The language of veracity.

When you listen, read or become a student of the comet, you begin to really understand the Socrates paradox. It is then you look back at the asteroid belt to find some real purpose on how this cauldron of misunderstanding, half-truths, fear mongering, hysteria, political propaganda and unawareness and naivety exist in the galaxy. I’m sure it has some purpose, as noisy that it is, as we are all still stuck in the asteroid belt. A bolide does fall from the sky from time to time.

In absence of the interaction and physical distancing, we can default to our paranoid reptilian brain, where everyone is suspect as prey (a lack of trust), with mass does of fight/flight stress hormones are released and this causes our bodies energy to be devoted towards hypersensitiveness of the fright in the world.

The pattern keeps continuing with a large dose of narrative driven current events that is often negatively political or sensational to our eyes and ears, along with a social norm that everyone must keep away from each other out of fear of harm.

The more this continues, the more the separation and harm one will do to themselves and society. This heighten stage of stress hormones pumping adrenaline and norepinephrine causes fatigue, depression and a weaken immune system over time. None are good for you.

I’m seeing the stress being played out in social media, where communication is becoming more vile, people are beginning to cast blame and shame, compliance and social order is confusing, and the uncertainty for the future has become a desperation of security and normalcy that no one agrees to.

We only need to listen to ourselves and to begin the process of bringing back our social hormones. Work and hobbies will only bring so much. The human touch is the spirit that will bring most of normal back. We all need a hello from a stranger, a friendly handshake, a pat on the back, a close hug, that common bond we can all find in each other, if we only can start again by being the first to say, “How are you?”

Most panics are way overblown and the form of the statistical probability that the boogey monster will come in contact and affect you in any way. Shark attacks, terrorist bombing, flesh eating bacteria, alien abductions and the list is long. But there are some panics that do hit most everyone and so taking every panic situation seriously is something we really must take seriously.

There is a event term called a black swan, for which a rare event has catastrophic effects of harm, and that these events are unpredictable in time and scope, so to hedge, prepare or just be paranoid about them is a completely rational emotion and tactic to use to help minimize the harm that it will inflict on you.

They say there is wisdom in crowds, so if the crowd is panic about something, the media is panicked, and the government is composed but underlined with panic, then take it seriously. There is so real harm to not blow it off as just another useless panic event that turns out to be nothing. In black swan events, it is better to brace yourself with preparedness and caution then then to treat panics as lottery events that only affect the very few. 

Working through the years as a direct report to many different managers and even interacting with senior leadership of a large corporation, who also come and go through time, there is something that is always in abundance, and that is individuals taking credit for all the “good results or performance” and deflecting or mitigating the “poor results”.

Watching or participating in award speeches after award speeches, and even though lip service is given to those who “helped” make it possible, but at the end, they brag to others how they were number one or how they won. Nothing wrong with this, but you can spot it out quickly based on one word a person uses with any accolades. Those that begin with an “I” and those that begin with “We”.

Going back to the behaviors of young children and we can even go far back as preschool age that this is observed. Kids want to be known to be first or recognize as the one that completed a task. You get a group of school age children to do a jigsaw puzzle, one will hide the last piece of the puzzle till the end when they reveal it to be the last piece. Kids when putting away toys, one would hold the lid of the box and make sure that they are the last kid to place the last toy in the box and be the last one that would close the lid and be seen by others as the kid who did that. Kids would work fast on projects or other school work as to be known to be first to be done or that they completed it faster than their rivals. There is just a whole host of different scenarios, but recognition is a fought after asset in children.

I then ask, which child doesn’t exhibit behavior like this? The response would be, not really any of them. They all compete for this recognition and they use scrupulous tactics to obtain it. Translated to adults? Age, experience or education does nothing to change that. I then realize that we all have this innate “I”.

Adults fight for recognition as much as children. There are many different forms of recognition; i.e. beauty, intelligence, success, athleticism, altruism and many others. This is a human trait that we all have different levels of. There may not be a true selfless human being who doesn’t care of one form of recognition they covet to gain or display. I say take it and use it. It is OK to be the one with the last piece of the puzzle from time to time. 

R

The flock and herds move with great numbers, all in unison and all following the leader. But there are those among them that take the off-beaten path, the lone wolf, the risk taker, the rebel of the group. They forge their own path, mostly alone, to make it out in search of fertile grounds, for which they risk death in the form of starvation or as prey to be eaten. Why do they do this? Why risk yourself to terra incognito and disregard the safety in numbers?

What they do is vitally important, because without these lone risk takers, the species could parish all together. By searching out for new pastures, upon discovery, can let the rest of the herd know where to go as a backup, in case their usual winter/summer grounds have been jeopardize. The worst case scenario is that the flock end up in a very bad situation and they all parish, but the lone risk taker that is somewhere else, can keep the species going as they didn’t get caught up in the devastation of the larger group.

Bee colonies work in the same fashion. While each bee in the hive has their assigned and destined task to keep the hive alive and thriving, the worker bees that fly out to the flower beds to collect pollen and nectar, keep returning again and again to the same flower beds as it is always the source for food. But there are a few bees that do not follow the path as the others. They are in search of other flower beds that are unknown, and they may never even find any. But without these small group of bees flying out in the wonderland without any known path and source of food, the hive can very well collapse if the known flower bed that kept the hive alive suddenly disappears.

Same goes for those in the human realm. Those pioneers, explorers and entrepreneurs that venture out to the unknown is what has advance the human civilization to what it is today with advancement in technology, standard of living, lifespan and many other aspects to human life that has generated abundance for many. Although there is nothing wrong with being part of the flock and making sure the bulk of us are working together to keep the hive going, but we also must recognize that there are a few bold ones among us that must be encourage to step out into the unknown, for the sake of themselves and our society. 

I find the topic of leadership extremely fascinating, because it shows the hierarchical construct of our social society and of organizations. It can dynamically change or never change. It can be positive and help everyone around them or it can be detrimental and foster a whole culture of deceit, criminality and violence. But the topic of leadership is so enticing to many people that they scramble to obtain any knowledge to help them understand it, obtain it and apply it.

Everyone that is teaching “leadership” to others all have their own principles, lessons and theories on what great leadership is. All of it seems good, but the most difficult aspect of learning to be a leader is boiling it down so that you can apply the leaning and skills of leadership so you can become an effective one. 

When it comes to knowing or learning what is the true principles of leadership, I do like the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s take on this:

‘You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.’

To me, this is a key aspect of boiling down the lessons, principles and theories of learning and applying leadership. It is also probably the one that we all struggle the most with and why only a few masters it. It is leading yourself and do it your own way.

Inspiring yourself to be your best, to accomplish your tasks and goals, to gain knowledge and to learn and to apply yourself to be a one of model character is the greatest challenge for anyone to be a leader. Leadership begins by leading yourself. That is the way I believe you can become a great leader and to lead others. Be the captain of your own leadership.  

Think of this as stair steps analogy of evolution biology. This isn’t a theory to explain away the gaps of the fossil record but the way molecularly how things work and how slowly a beneficial gene mutation must go through to catch on to the wider population of the species. One of the most profound discoveries in evolutionary biology is that many genes that we posses and express has no real benefits to fitness or anything else that is considered an advantage trait, but fillers that get stuffed in between that is just there as fillers, much like a pillow and the stuffing inside.

This had me thinking that long periods of very slow change or stasis, may in fact, not really be a very bad thing. If it works for the earth and species over time, then it’s possible that long periods of stasis could in fact be beneficial. A period of stabilization and status quo is very common occurrences in business and personally, though a much shorter time period than evolutionary time frame, but none the less the same if scaled.

We often fill the time with nothing, but fillers of leisure and idleness and months and years pass without much or any change, but these are the times that we experience the most and is what is common. To accept this as normal is not a just a way to cop out and tune out of your goals, but an understanding that hyper periods are short lived, and stasis is what takes place most of the time. Accept stasis but be prepared for the hyper period of change that will come.

This was more than just building a cleaver mousetrap, but when beyond sometimes the most well-funded R&D programs of large corporations. Bio-medical devices, computer programming, process improvements and radical new ideas coming to life.

What usually happens to most of these inventions, is like most startups, they didn’t walk very far into the mainstream, but most of these inventors were ok with it, because it may have served such a small niche market or really just themselves as an individual person.

There are many of them that make it to the mainstream and are licensed, adopted or sold to companies. What companies can do to these inventions that come from shade tree inventors is make the improvements, functionality and scalability possible for wide adoption. The lone tinkerer in the basement working a novel idea cannot be dismissed. The ingenuity of the individual human and even the small niche group collective is a huge idea concept factory that generate the real building blocks of viable products to solve the world’s problems. 

As working adults, most breaks fall on the weekend, holidays or your occasional vacation, but there are many working adults, increasing in numbers, who never truly experience the real break. Weekend is catch-up for other mental or physical work or even occupational work, holidays is taxing, and vacations come with their own mental anguish and grind. So how can one experience the break?

The break doesn’t have to be long. A mere afternoon or evening nap seems to recharge the energy meter. Many people take up some form of meditation or exercise regiment that is the equivalent of the school time break that we experienced as school children. Either way, our lives are busier than ever and to find time for the ‘break’ is becoming one that must be thoughtful or planned or our lives will be one without that much needed pause.

The real inertia to overcome in our lives is that of coming out of the break. When things just got quite and the mind is clear from chaotic and racing thoughts, we must enter back in to work to tend to the garden, or our crops will wither and die on the vine. It is as much as a cycle as sleep and waking life. Return from break can be as pleasurable as the cup of coffee when you awake in the morning to start your day. Return from break!

It is interesting to read the history of mail-order catalogs that started even as far back as the late 1400’s, but begin to really come into being in the 1800’s and into the early 1900’s. There are even mail-order catalog companies that started out as late 2010 that thrive today. Yes, many of these mail-order catalog companies, such as Sears, Montgomery Wards, JC Penny’s and others started brick and mortar stores and online e-commerce presence today, and though downward direction they go in business, they still have brand presence and still have loyal shoppers that take part in all of their sales channels.

Brick and mortar do have meaning well beyond the traditional retail store front. I stare at cinder blocks of buildings and see the mortar that keeps it all glued together, making these two combo materials better with each other than they are apart. One provides the strength and the other fills in the gaps and keeps it steady. It’s a great business analogy that can translate to the foundation of any company and it reminds us to think about what really keep the pillars and walls of our business strong and able to withstand the resistance that it will face in the marketplace.

The brick of the company is the products and services it provides, it’s financial health and brand. The mortar is the employees and the company culture and the customers. Without enough of either one, you are either on a shaky ground and vulnerable to collapse or don’t have enough strength to support yourself. Think about the two sides of your business as brick and mortar and build a foundation to make your company stand strong. 

Everyone experiences their time and place differently from one another. Another person’s lost decade will be their neighbor’s best. That means we shouldn’t hang the weight of the decade on any one thing. But every decade does bring something to the world that is new, exciting and a change that almost everyone in the world seems to benefit from, even if it is just a skosh.

The teen decade is the age of mass adoption of mobile communication. Never has the world been connected to each other from a device that fits in a pants pocket, but it is very real now. What that does in the future is very hard to tell. It appears we are still as random and insignificant as we were before being unknown and disconnected from most of the world. The access to information and knowledge is huge though, but just like the great libraries, I’m not for sure if anyone really takes much advantage of this wealth of knowledge and wisdom that one can drown themselves into. Instead most gravitate towards entertainment.

Social media is just like it was in 20th century America, when we gathered around with friends and chuckled at jokes, talked about sensational current events and listen to others talk about the latest movie, music, books or other mass entertainment distribution. It was the modern life and today, social media is modern life. The bread and circus are still around as part of the human experience as it was in the ancient Roman days.

We still inch forward in progress, as there are still many people whose passion drives them to make a difference or change in the world. These are the people who drive themselves to work like crazy, to soak up all the knowledge they can, to dive in to learning a skill, to make mistakes and learn, and to think contrarian and practical thoughts to move the gear of human motion forward towards a better future. With the connected world, this will bring more people into the special realm of movers and shakers and the more we can bring out to do great things in the decade of the 2020’s, the better we all will be. That is what we hope the next decade will bring. 

There have been very interesting studies on human sight, on how narrow of a focus we can clearly see through the input organ. They say it is only a 2% of highly focus, were we can see fine details, and less than 20% of peripheral focus for even color recognition. Even when tracking eye moments following someone reading a text on a page, the focus is only one word, to even partial pieces of the word at a time, depending on length. As we read across any page, we can only cognitively focus on one word at a time and everything else is just blurred out.

The other interesting revelation about how narrow of a focus we can give, there is also the concept of time. That any thought in our head or any focus attention is only given to one thing, and nothing more. We cannot think of two or more things at the same time. Thoughts and focus can change as time goes on, but in one moment, that one thought, that one sight, that single word on a page you are reading, it is the only thought you can give. You think about something else, the thought is removed and replaced with that other thought.

They even say that post rationalization, (thoughts about why you did something, like something, hated something after the fact), is, completely made up on the fly. We cannot go back in time to a single thought and think it again. Thoughts come and go at the speed of moments.

Knowing that singular focus of a thought is all we have, that this ability to hyper focus on one thing at a time, and even see clearly only a few degrees of sight, shows us that we humans must have used this as a great evolutionary advantage towards survival of some kind. If focus is a key to survival, and that one thought for one moment is all the energy we can muster for that moment, then knowing you have only that one moment of focus is a great revelation, in my opinion.

Taking the reigns of your thoughts will take great discipline, but to keep your series of thoughts focused on one problem or thought for as long as possible, will bring great clarity to you. We are designed in that way. 

It was trivial, but it led to larger questions about what does time really do to us? No matter what, time takes its course and brings everything with it. This is you, and I and every living and inanimate object along with it. Time makes changes to everything. Some faster than others, but there is no escaping the forces of time.

Why does time then seem to be perceived to speed up as we get older in age? I don’t think anyone has a real good answer to this, but one theory was the time of experience theory. Take a year for example. If you are 4-years of age, one year is a quarter of your life, but if you are 20-years of age, one year is only 1/20th of your life experience. The older you become, our own calculation of time, such as day, month or year becoming increasingly less of a percentage of our own life experience. The time span of a year then becomes a mere fraction of your own experience and so to that, the years will be perceived to go very quickly.

Time is a great mystery, but that great debate my friend and I had, we concluded that time is an energy force. It is felt on all of us and it carries us forward, at what it seems to be at ever increasing speed, till one day we are gone. Time, though, will keeps going on with whatever it has in its wake at any present moment. We are not trapped, but we do need to respect time and take it seriously and it matters. So, try to make as many moments matter for you, knowing that most of our moments may seem wasted on sleep and idleness, which may not be a bad thing, but do the things you always wanted to do. Don’t let time drown you. 

Sometimes the right moment comes forth and a parable can be the best answer that is delivered. I had an example of this used one time in a team meeting. An associate was going on and on about how customers X were not good customers and that we should go try find a new set of customers elsewhere. After rounds of what I would call misguided expressions of frustration by the individual regarding a certain customer base, I decided to employ the parable of the Travelers.

The story: A traveler was walking down a road in the countryside when he spotted an old farmer tending to his field near the road. The traveler decided to walk over to the farmer and ask him a question. "Mister, may I ask you about people in the town down this road?" The farmer replied, "What were people like in the town that you came from?"

"Oh, people there are bad people. They lie, cheat, steal and are of no good character," answered the traveler. "Well, unfortunately, that is the people you will find over at the next town down the road", said the farmer. The traveler looked perplexed and resumed the journey down the road.

Sometime later another traveler was walking down the same road and spotted the farmer. Doing the same, the traveler went up to the farmer, who was tending his field and ask him how people were like in the town down the road. The farmer asked him the same question, "How were people like in the town that you came from?"

The traveler responded, "People were great. Nice, honest and would help anyone. A great community with great caring people." The farmer then answered the traveler's question, "That is the kind of people you will find in the next town down the road." The traveler smiled and went off down the road to the next town.

This parable teaches that your outlook and perspective of people, place or situation actually is determined by your own personal perception. What you expect is what you will get. The farmer was teaching that to the travelers that whatever you think, is what you will see.

When I was telling this parable to the group, it was all silence from for a few minutes after the end of the parable, and although I don't know if telling this parable radically changed the associate's own perspective, but I did notice a change of attitude towards more positive angle after that meeting. Sparingly I have used parables to communicate a message, but when I do use them from time to time, people listen. Find a few that have some great wisdom to share and share it to others, it will deliver a positive impact.

There is something to say about old stuff that still works and why get rid of it? Furniture and homes last centuries, cars last a generation some of the time, and airplanes even longer than cars. So why not keep green screen computers or legacy systems in place? If it isn't broke why replace it?

There is a truism to that statement, but an interesting concept I read somewhere or heard somewhere, (I want to give credit to the person who thought about or research it), was that the more sophisticated the technology was, the more faster it would need to be replaced. So, furniture and homes are low technology, so it doesn't need to be replaced as often. Nothing crazy had come to airplanes since the turbine engine, other than small incremental step changes, but the technology to make it fly is still quite old, and cars, while becoming more sophisticated, especially with Tesla and electric vehicles, it's a motor driving a carriage on 4-wheels.

But think of the cars for a moment. I remember when having a 10+ year old car was still considered a pretty good used car, and many people had cars that old. Today, people change cars every 3-years now. As cars become more enveloped in tech, it is increasing in frequency of being disposed and replaced.

I know how fast computers change. I remember in 2000, I bought the latest and greatest desktop computer. A Pentium III 500 MHz with a 10-gig hard drive. A friend of mine thought it was awesome, so he bought the same computer a month later, but his was a Pentium III 700 MHz with a 20-gig hard drive, and then later that same year the Pentium IV came out.

I kept that computer around for a few years, but later did upgrade to something newer, and the cycle continues with mobile phones and devices today. So why keep these legacy systems around?

Because there are people who don't want to change, even if everything else is changing around them. I heard a great story today from someone that told the story of their grandparents’ home that went from having an outhouse to indoor plumbing. This home was outfitted with a bathroom and toilet, but the grandfather refused to do his business there, instead he went out to the outhouse, because to him, you don't relieve yourself in the house. It was what always happened and always was before, so they kept the outhouse just for him.

This is true in today's businesses who keep these legacy systems around. They need to change or adapt, but they don't, because they can't get over what they have always done and used. Being open and knowing that change always comes and technology changes even faster, that there may be a place for legacy systems, but some day, the horse and buggies need to get off the road.

The trees never grew strong roots that secured itself well into the dirt and the trees can easily be pushed over and pulled out of the ground with much less effort than their outside counterparts. This baffled the scientist and it took a while to discover the reason. That reason is that the trees inside lack one stress component, and that is the wind.

The wind, it was discovered, provided a critical role for the trees by introducing variable stress against them, for which the tree countered by growing stress wood that was strengthening the content of the wood itself in order for it to grow strong trunks and branches and secure the roots more securely into the ground.

This is a great analogy to use when discussing to yourself and others that outside resistance and stress that is blown on us will inevitably make us stronger and able to resist the bombardment of stresses that will always come from our work and personal lives.

Business is no different in that it will always face an environment where wind is always there to blow you down. The mistake would be to try to insular yourself from this by trying to protect your business from the outside world or to create an illusion of an artificial environment that doesn’t challenge you to face the stresses of the marketplace by ignoring it or immune to it. Be outside and let the wind make your business resilient. 

There is plenty of people who speak on behalf of a motivating factor of death, by using aphorism such as “you only live once’, “carpe diem” and “life too short”. This is spoken, written and even tattooed on skin throughout the world, but a question remains if the thought of death motivates us to do all the things we want to do?

Those that have lived a long life and are seeing their sunset approaching will tell a coin of two sides of life. The side with happiness or experiences they can share that they realized in their life and the other side, which is the regrets they share of the experiences they never did have but wished too.

The people who are of old age and knowing that death is much closer to them than most, for the most part, idle themselves to rest rather than to seize the day of any effort of activity towards accomplishing goals. Those who are faced with a terminal illness also have different outlook of death, according to some research done on this. Those that are knowing the time frame of their own death often share a positive outlook towards it and accept the meaningfulness and connection to others and life itself and appear to be happy, but again, death doesn’t seem to make them move forward with any audacious goals to accomplish.

Even though we want death to motivate us, in thought, it doesn’t appear to push anyone along as much as we think it would. What defines motivation is the drive to take action to initiate and persist to accomplishing a goal. This takes patience, persistence and perseverance and what jump starts that and keeps it on track is one that is unique to each person and as mysterious as death. 

The overriding factor that I have experience on why meetings are not productive, goes further back then the meeting itself. It is the time for which it plans to be conducted. Most times, these meetings are almost impromptu or have very little forenotice between the time of the meeting and the time it was disseminated. This just about ruins most of the attendees’ schedule, as they already had other plans with their time, so their emotional state is one of inconvenience. But since these meetings are scheduled by supervisors and quick impromptu meetings have a sense of importance or urgency behind them, then everyone feels compelled to attend.

Once in a great while, these meetings have an important announcement to make or stand down of some kind that really do require the full attention of the staff. But most meetings is to reiterate old tired rhetoric of metric standards that were missed or going the wrong direction, and the real reason the meeting is taking place, is because the senior leadership of the supervisor was told that he/she needed to ‘deliver a message’ and to find out what they can do different.

This is when talking in circles start to happen. They ask for ideas on how we can ‘improve’ a certain metric or to get the direct reports to comply with an initiative that is slow to be adapted, but the ideas everyone shares is recycled ideas that uses carrots or sticks of some kind. Nothing new comes out of it, but to the supervisor, they did their task by having the meeting, but no one learned anything new.

Meeting can be productive, but the only way it can be productive is that someone or everyone in attendance learns something new. The real goal of meetings is to learn something new, either through discussions and brainstorming or through disseminating information to the broader group. When it becomes an exercise of compliance, then it has no real value. 

Understanding how these illogical nudges work to produce outcomes is a totally new field or study called, behavioral economics. This is noble prize-winning research that really shows how both vulnerable but guarded we are. As much as I have consumed on this subject, which is just a faint glimpse, it appears that we can boil down the human psyche into four, we can say really two part. We don't like uncertainty and high risk to reward, and we like status and attractiveness. 

How business use these for competitive advantages, exploit opportunities or solve problems is usually not done but by a very few. It is the logical correlations and logical goals that win the day and to allow any experimentation or curiosity to find out more about human behavior is too risky and doesn't reward in the short term. But a simple dabble in the human illogical pool can results into big positive gains, as behavioral economics has shown in the research. Those bold enough to jump from the high board to the unpredictable and learn to swim in it will develop a worthwhile lifetime skill. 

We all see our own version of events and our memory of those events can be very clear in our mind, but we could be psychologically inserting false memories to align our thoughts of the events to reconstruct that narrative we believe to be true.

There is also the progressive distortion effect of the story when it gets passed from one person to another. As the mediator between two parties trying to ferret out the real story is always a challenge, as there is often a side you do take and to remain unbiased or neutral is a very difficult mental challenge. When these parties are using secondhand information to describe the story, it even become much more off track to the real story, but we do seem to treat it as a real story and act accordingly.

I know secondhand information is off track and often by a long shot. If you ever have been a receiver of a conflicting story and they tell you a series of events or conversations from a secondhand source, but you are the primary source and firsthand witness of that, you will see that the secondhand source is so off, with just a little sprinkling of the truth, but the further it goes from the sources to third-hand and to gossip level of dissemination, it’s basically far from the truth to even be remotely useful to be of any value, but everyone still treats it as the truth.

A friend told me that President Truman would often times read ten articles from different newspapers about or covering the same story, as they often differ from each other and that you can use all these different versions to paint yourself a close picture of what really happened, and most often times it was in the middle between the two extreme versions of the story. I don’t know that this came from Truman or not, as I haven’t verified it, but it is another example of maybe even quoting President Truman from coming up with this truth-seeking exercise could be false itself.

The middle is usually the case. When one person said this happened, and the other person explained a different version, usually both combined with the extremities chopped off is what most likely happened. Before leaning towards the favored party or believing a story from another person and be especially careful from secondhand sources and beyond. Know that decisions are made from inaccuracies that can have serious consequences. Look at multiple sources and remember that usually the middle line is where the truth is revealed. 

What is considered ‘up’ would be successes or goal attainments that helped you reach a higher level of satisfaction. That differs per person and business and it could be one goal or many. For example, buying a house, visiting Greece, finishing a car project, climbing Kilimanjaro, retiring or whatever it is. These are goals that you want to attain, and you have it checked off as done.

What is considered ‘down’, would be the setbacks that caused the goal to be extended out of reach and a bit further away or a goal you have completely given up on. These causes can be financial setbacks, physical setbacks, priority changes, and many other circumstances we all experience in life that derails the momentum.

Then there is ‘level’, which is coasting on day by day with minimal effort and no setbacks. You are content and flowing on the stream of time, possibly happy with a sprinkling of regrets, as everyone has them. This isn’t a bad place to be, but beware that this ‘level’ path can be gradually going in a downward direction and lead to a less fulfilling life.

Choosing to walk on the track or take the stairs is all about the energy and effort one puts on your forward path journey. It takes more energy and exertion to climb stairs and a similar energy is done in going down the stairs in the form of balance control and coordination to keep from falling. The lesser energy is done by walking on the track, which you can go a long way before getting tired. This requires patience and persistence to attain your goals, but beware that you may be walking in circles and never get anywhere.

Awareness is the key to understanding where you are at this present moment. Are you moving up, down or level? Then know if you are climbing stairs or on a track. Strive to move up, either it be on a track or stairs, because this leads to more fulfillment with fewer regrets in life, when time finally will take all of us away.

In the startup world, the great entrepreneurs of the world preach that a new business should be focused on solving a problem. Then you have the Drucker perspective that preached that you need to focus on opportunities and not fixing problems.

What is the difference between the two? Could they both be right in their own way or should we lean more towards one than the other? Or do they really mean the same thing?

Peter Drucker says that fixing problems only gets you back to equilibrium to yesterday. That spending your energy and resources on fixing problems only diverts your attention on opportunities for the future.

The 21st century entrepreneurial class says that there are many problems that people or businesses have and solving those problems brings out a viable business that you can capitalize on.

Let's use large companies that has sprung up in the last decade or two to see what they did and are they solving problems or capitalizing on opportunities? Did Google solve the problems of searching the Internet? Was it a problem? I remember the early days in the 90's, and there were plenty of search engine platforms around. I would argue that it was easier and faster to search for relevant information back then than it is today. So, I don't think that there was a problem that was solved by Google.

What was the difference between Amazon and other early online booksellers? There weren’t any problems getting books from physical stores, libraries and quite a few online booksellers of the early internet, so there wasn't a problem getting books. Amazon capitalized on an opportunity to be a major distributor of books. They didn't really solve any problems.

I could go through a lot of other examples. Maybe I'm looking at it through a small lens or have confirmation bias on the opportunity vs problems dilemma, because there are problems in the world that needs solving, but I'm leaning towards opportunity is the key for business success. Is solving the problems the opportunity?

Let's use the Pacific Garbage Patch problem. This floating plastic debris field in the ocean that is in dire need of being cleaned up. There is a race for all kinds of devices and equipment that are in competition to see which one can cleanup this garbage patch successfully, quickly and efficiently. I've seen a dozen different systems demonstrated and used to showcase or try their hand in solving this problem. But once we get it cleaned up, what then? We are back to clean ocean, which is solving for yesterday.

Is the real opportunity that of cleaning up every water way, ocean, lake, river, reservoir etc.? Garbage collection and disposal is big business and there is an opportunity in garbage in water. Not only does it need cleaning up, but contentiously cleaned, because we may not solve the problem of trash reaching the waterways. If it was looked at as an opportunity, then maybe it can generate faster traction to getting something done, rather than being stalled by problem solving, trying to fix the best machine to solve garbage collection in the water.

I look at the word and action of opportunity as that of having a positive connotation to it, when the word problem has more of a negative one. If expressed or look at in that light, I say that opportunity is the direction that businesses need to take to help continue their success now and in the future.

Any organization somewhat changes their focus on what is important from time to time, but it generally falls to generating revenue and keeping a healthy growth pace on revenues. Why does it seem like a major frustration for senior managers to get everyone on the same page?

Soon everyone is pointing fingers and looking to chop heads, and this doesn't make the situation any better, nor does it appear to really fix anything. They might plug a hole in the dike with one finger, but soon more holes will pop up, so they are constantly moving their fingers to plug other holes. Senior managers are constantly firefighting on their talent going from one hot spot to another, but the forest will continue to smolder and never really achieve a peaceful growth period where you aren't playing whack-a-mole on people.

Does it ever get to that point that everyone gets on the same page? I only hear this happening in small teams, especially closely knitted small teams that rely on each other to make the machine run, but the larger the organization gets with ever increasing employees, it becomes a different human resource to manage. It is better to run everything in small teams? What is considered a right number in a team dynamic? When does a tally of humans working together go from closed knitted to everyone for themselves? There must be a threshold and maybe that is worth figuring out.

Maybe the way to get everyone on the same page is to have small teams work as words on a page, each doing their part in their small way, each acting as a complete word and each word then brings out the message of the page, and therefore everyone is on the same page, together.

There is a graveyard of businesses that are used as examples of very large companies that met the reaper when they decided to keep the status quo of their yesteryear and shelved their innovation, if they had any innovation at all. The employees that experienced the plunge from the inside of the sinking ship, in retrospect, say that the company or themselves just completely misread consumers or emerging trends or technologies and said it was dismissed as nothing but temporary fads.

What is the innovation and why is it missed by the companies with the largest resources and talent? It's missed because the emerging trends tend to happen very slowly at the start and doesn't get real legs till it starts to become wildly adopted, and when that happens, it does so very quickly and often exponentially.

Large companies, for the most part, move very slowly and so cannot spot trends that move as slow or slower than themselves, but they cannot move fast to catch up either. The emerging trends, either it be a business model, advertisement market, product technology or brand positioning, take the shape of the infamous bell-shaped curve.

The most famous of this bell-shaped curve used for business analogy purposes, is what they call the product life cycle. The early adopters come in at the beginning and then the majority comes in after that, and it eventually matures and dies off. That is why the mantra is repeated "Innovate! Innovate! Innovate!" If you follow a very liner path of small incremental changes or slow changes to your business, then you will miss the curve and go straight into flat line.

Besides moving slowly, some businesses also have short-term vision or mindset. It's about the end of the month or quarter, maybe end of the year is pushing it as the horizon of goal setting. While it is very difficult to forecast any future that has some months or years in front of it, innovation requires the future to be planted now and germinate to a tree in greater time spans than what a company needs to hit top line sales for the month.

When Kodak missed digital cameras and Blockbuster missed home delivery and streaming, it's because they looked short, missed what trend was moving slower than them, and couldn't catch up once that trend moved fast to wild adoption and completely upset their traditional business model or offering.

Example of a trend moving slow is blockchain. Even if everyone is talking about it, even if it seems like just a passing fad, it would be worth paying very close attention to this. Innovate or die!

In business, the 4th quarter is almost like that. There are a lot of business that have the 4th quarter as a do or die scenario. The holiday shopping season is what they bank on to take them through the slow times or seasonality of the rest of the year. This is also the quarter that businesses reevaluate themselves and where they stand and try to get the gears moving to have momentum for the new year.

With the holiday season already underway, long before Halloween and Thanksgiving is much of a thought, the Santa decorations, the Christmas funds, holiday party planning and people inputting their wish list on Amazon is already happening. "It's starting earlier and earlier", I hear from people around weekend picnic tables, as summer drift into fall. So, is the 4th quarter being stretched to maximize the most time out of this game?

If business is a sport, then the 4th quarter grind to the finish is a rough and exhausting way to try to win, but for many businesses and the billions of people who rely on 4th quarter commerce, it is the reality. If every passing year, the quarter is being drawn out a little more each year, helping everyone gain a little more time to score, the one thing is for certain that you don't want to do, and that is to take the knee and give up.

But is business really a sport? Or it is a keen to exercising and working out more than battling an opponent to see who can win? One of the best phrases I've heard is, "Business is Fitness", and that is a school of thought that you focus on yourself (business) and work each day to get better and better and more fit, even if your business is cyclical or seasonal. The other school of thought is that competition and competitiveness is what wins in business. Probably either way works. If the business works better directed outwardly or directed internally is a great answer to discover about your business and if you are out there to play the game or if you are just into fitness.

Here is something that you may have experienced in the workplace. You have co-workers, you either work with or are direct reports to you, especially those that report to you, that tell tall tales. You ask about something, and they always have some weird excuse, and at first. You cannot tell if it is the truth or not. But after so many weird one-off types of excuses that no one else has ever experienced or shared, then you begin to wonder.

Why is it that employees, or should I say people in general, have to make up a false excuse? Are they afraid of looking bad? Are they afraid of the consequences for telling the truth? Have they been conditioned that way for a long time, since childhood? Whatever it is, they seem to have a fear of something. So, they hide behind the fake facade of lies and tall tales.

This made me look within myself and wonder if I'm the one that they fear? If so, is it possible to gain the trust of a person that tells tall tales to be honest and factual about their misses, shortcomings, failures, losses or others that put us back or behind?

I can probably understand them. I have many times spoken the truth about my thoughts, opinions, facts or feelings about something. Sometimes it caught up in emotions and that can get you in trouble. I have observed that some people don’t want to know the truth or really don't want to understand your point of view because they are so worried about themselves to take stock in your honesty, so they rather hear the lie.

So if the truth can nick and cut you, and can even hurt your career, but for all those that fear telling the truth, for whatever reason, the tall tales and lies will eat you alive from inside of you, or you will get so accustomed to it that eventually it will do you in. I've seen the people that always seem to lie and even though they get by for a long time with that mindset, eventually it does all come back to haunt them. I've seen it too many times.

Speak the truth for yourself and knowing that the consequences that follow will be one that you can honesty learn from. I don't think you can learn much by telling lies.

Tycoon has an interesting history. It is actually a westernized version of a word that originated from Japan. It is interesting how this word, originally taikun, actually changed to tycoon, when other words of Japanese origin that has made it to the English language like karaoke, haiku, manga, shiitake and many others have actually kept their close Japanese to English translations, with Tycoon the only word I can find that changes in spelling and expanded its meaning.

Taikun in Japan in the 1800's means a person who was a military leader in Japan, normally who was the Shōgun (Military Dictator of Japan) was called a Taikun. It somehow made it over to the United States when a Japanese delegation in the 1860's called Abraham Lincoln a taikun (press spelled Tycoon), and soon the press was using the word Tycoon to describe anyone who was the leader of a group, political party machine and soon moved over towards the business leaders of industry.

T. Boone earn the title of Tycoon when he entered the oil & gas business as a wildcatter and through some impressive schemes from a series of company acquisitions. Some as impressive as Gulf Oil, which at the time of acquisition, was 30X more in valuation then his own company, like a minnow eating a bass. He moved into the limelight as this Oklahoma to Texas oil man buying up all kind of stakes and position in companies, through a lot of different ways that it prompted the Security and Exchange Commission to come up with the one share = one vote rule, because of prevalence of multi-vote shares or no-vote shares that were around during the late part of the 1900's.

So, what T. Boone Pickens did was act like a military general and dictator. Going in for the slay to take over the bounty and resources of the conquered, but he did it through business savvy and vulnerabilities in corporate structures. He amassed a fortune for himself, owned stakes in just about any upstream to downstream oil & gas and even wind energy companies and did give a lot of his fortune away to universities, hospitals, foundations and charities. He was the Taikun of the era of Texas Oil and we give our due respects to T. Boone and his family. May he rest in peace.

You earn the title of Tycoon by taking over your business industry in a big way. Others who were called Tycoons, in banking, railroad, mining and etc., all employed roughly the same strategies and tactics. Full on takeover by gobbling up everyone in your wake and become the leader in the industry. If you are inspired to be one, start by acquiring your competitor and then keep acquiring or having stakes in the others till you reach majority in your industry, then you will be the Tycoon.

I'm intrigued by stories that do comparison between meticulous technocratic detail plans on a project versus one that is sort of winging it but make it with just the focus of the end goal in mind. Which one wins out?

I remember hearing the story between the Sydney Opera House, which was hailed as one of the most detailed planned projects to be devised in Australia, but became the world's gross example of one that failed to even remotely go as planned with something like a 1400% cost overruns and took over a decade to finish beyond the planned completion date.

The opposite supposedly happened with the Sydney Harbor Bridge, which finished early and underbudget. With the Harbor Bridge, the story goes that the project manager just asked what the budget was and when do you want it to be completed by and that was, they went with. While I'm sure there is much more to the story, but the Sydney Opera House was planned in great detail with day-by-day, exact materials needed, move times, man hours per job function and all the way to the last bolt and nut, but the Harbor Bridge not nearly as much detailing planning went into that project.

It is something we call the planning fallacy. We, as humans, have no real way to predict the future and the future is inherently unpredictable. So why is planning necessary if things normally don’t go according to plans? Planning is basically a map towards an outcome, and that is the best we can strive for.

Plans can be very liner, like going from point A to B, or have contingencies with many outcomes. Or it may even be emergency planning, which you hope never actually happens, but still have plans just in case. Whatever it is, you are seeking a desired outcome with your plans. The act of planning just puts your mind in motion to start to move forward, that is why we hear quotes about "planning" is the essential ingredient, not actually the plan itself. But the real goal of any plan is to get to X of that treasure map of success.

Planning starts your journey, but just be careful of planning each and every footstep as it is really unnecessary, because it will never happen in that way. Know where you are and where you need to go, let the journey take you there.  

Boléro teaches us that there is such a thing as an end. There is no such thing as being big enough to overcome that (think 'too big to fail'). You may have begun with a single formula of business success, then repeat that formula and you keep expanding into sales growth, different markets and ever-growing workforce. Things are good and the future is bright and then... then...POOF!

In nature, there is two paths of growth. One is called determinate growth and the other is indeterminate growth. In determinate growth, think of mammals, such as us. We grow very rapidly from birth to adulthood, but we stop growing after that. Why don't we keep growing and turn into giants? Because if we never stopped growing, the physics stop working to make us even functional. The structure and material of bones would reach a point that it couldn't support the weight with the gravity drag of mass pulling on it. Even the blue whale, the largest animal on the planet stops growing. I read that if it keeps growing it would soon reach a point that it couldn't even open its own mouth to feed.

But indeterminate growth is sometimes thrown around as a growth that continues on, but happens at a very slow pace and even then, it isn't infinite as the organism eventually dies. Think your hair. Your hair will keep growing longer and longer, but it does reach a point that it will grow so slowly that its growth isn't even noticeable and barely measurable. A tree will only grow to a certain height, but the trunk will keep growing thicker and thicker till it's death, but it will never grow taller or wider, just internally thicker.

Back to Boléro. The composition is an example of life at determinate speed and growth. But you can only repeat that pattern to the point that you run out of instruments to add to the composition, so the end must come. A company is the same as any organism on the planet. But every quarter and year they look for that growth, they have a pattern (business model) that is helping them with the growth and they stick with that pattern because it is all that they know, it is cooked into their DNA, and they march on not knowing of their own fate in the determinate growth world they belong to.

Companies can outlast people's careers and even lifetimes, but they cannot outlast their own fate. So if you are in the 1st part as 1st flute (young start-up) or in the middle (mature company), the finale is only 5 bars, so it will happen very quickly and you will now you are there when the pattern changes and becomes chaotic in a very short period of time. It's ok! There needs to a finale.

But as quickly as it started it quickly ended with the two men with blooded lips shaking hands and later becoming friends for quite some time.

I also heard a recent story told to me about how at first that he didn't get along with another employee. Thought the person to be lazy, manipulative, all out for themselves. So these two employees traded heated words all the time, ignored each other on occasions and just had this friction going all the time. But one day he decided to stop this and just really talked to him one-on-one, and now they are good friends and he doesn't think those negative things about that person anymore, like he first did during those friction time.

I have ran into that friction before. How do you arrive at to that point to actually get on the boat and cross the river? Do what we think about that person, either through experience, intuition or perception can be that wrong that this person could actually become a good friend?

It's very hard. Because I'm sure many people have experienced someone toxic to you for some reason and it may be a very good reason. I once had a boss that yelled and screamed at everybody, never was helpful and just tried to rule by intimidation and fear. A lot of people have experienced people like this at work life. My emotions on this person was that this dude was a bad guy, through a through.

I was lucky to escape this boss with a transfer, but he was still visible at work each day, so it wasn't a total escape. But one day law enforcement came in and arrested him for a very good reason. It turned out my intuition and perceptions were right. So how can I really be friends with that person? Could I still? Or are there people we truly need to keep a distance from and remain cold towards each other forever? I don't know what the answer is, but it is a thought in my mind as something we all have experienced, and we all deal with in in our own way.  

Do we really know ourselves? Or do we think we are the better part of ourselves on point most of the time? Do we lack skills to even do our position effectively? It is so hard to evaluate ourselves in any accurate manor. Other people do that for you.

Most people just have opinions and that may not be the true critical assessment path to seek, but someone skillful with people and have tons of experience with many different types of personalities and evaluated skill-sets usually have the insight to give glimpses of yourself that you may never be aware of. That is a very valuable consultation and one that is to be seriously pondered and considered. Especially when they tell you about your weaknesses and shortcomings.

So how do you respond to this? Do you go into defensive mode and try to push back? Do you tell yourself to focus on fixing or closing the gap of your weaknesses and shortcomings? Or do you just double-down on your strengths, thank the sage for giving you a point of view about yourself that you may never have been aware of and you take it as a very valuable learning step towards happiness and fulfillment? 

Knowing a little more about yourself than you did before and understanding that we all have strengths and weaknesses and the sage's advise was just what you need now and again to keep you on the right track and not wondering our in the desert.